Shop Floor Accident, 1905

This hand-colored print satirizes industrial workplace safety through caricatured working-class figures. A man in a green jacket aims a rifle at machinery while colleagues react with alarm; scattered tools and a prone figure suggest injury or death. The artist employs exaggerated features and physical types typical of early 20th-century German humor sheets (Bilderbogen), using line-work and watercolor to mock social types. The print descends from traditions established by Hogarth and Gillray. Such prints mediated public attitudes toward labor and industry, prefiguring how comics would depict working life through caricature.