"The Strike"

Painter and lithographer Robert Koehler emigrated to the U.S. from Germany with his parents—a skilled machinist and a sewing teacher—when he was four years old. Koehler painted The Strike in 1886 while living in Munich, and drew on scenes of industrial workers in England and Belgium. He was inspired by the massive 1877 strike wave in the U.S., when hundreds of thousands of railroad workers and their sympathizers walked off the job and violent clashes left workers dead and injured. The painting was also reproduced as a wood engraving in Harper's Weekly magazine on May 1, 1886.

External Link: germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org