Rockwell Kent 1882-1971

This work was a commission for the Charles Bruning Company, Inc. of Chicago, Illinois which primarily sensitized reproduction papers.   Kent obtained the commission through Henry R. Davis of the Rapid Blueprint Company of Los Angeles and it resulted in a number of additional commissions for Kent, beginning in the late 1930s. This work was originally reproduced using the offset lithograph process as a Christmas card for the clients of the Charles Bruning Company.  The card was accompanied by the following statement: "We again follow our custom of the past years, that of portraying on our Christmas cards, some of the world's outstanding historical engineering and construction achievements. 

"This year it is our pleasure to pay tribute to America's Steel and Allied Industries.  It is these industries that have contributed immeasurably to the growth of our nation in time of peace and to these industries we are indebted for their colossal output of war materiels, without which final victory would have been impossible. 

"Mr. Rockwell Kent, whose work is widely known, was commissioned again this year to illustrate our Christmas card.  His illustration portrays an early episode of the steel industry known as 'puddling.'  This was a process of converting pig iron into steel by subjecting it to heat and stirring in a puddling furnace in the presence of oxidizing substances, thereby reducing the carbon content to the desired percentage."

According to Richard V. West, America's Steel Industry "is a very fine example of the commissioned illustrative work that Kent created during the 1940s for various corporate clients such as the Charles Bruning Company and the American Export Lines.  The artist himself thought highly of this particular image and it is reproduced in his autobiography It's Me O Lord."