The Forge
La fragua
1812-1816 Oil on linen
71 1/2 inches x 49 1/4 inches
181.6 cm x 125 cm
The Frick Collection, New York City
United States

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The Frick Collection has a web site
page on La fragua here.

...when Louis-Philippe's 'Spanish Gallery' opened at the Louvre in Paris in 1838, among the paintings by Velàzquez, Murillo and El Greco hung Goya's scenes of everyday life and the labouring poor, such as The Forge. These works certainly seemed eccentric to the exhibition-going Parisian public. 'Why have paintings by Goya been acquired?' asked the satirical magazine Le Charivari. 'Goya may have been a lively caricaturist but he's a very ordinary painter.

Sarah Symmons, Goya, published by Phaidon 1998, page 312

Space is treated so negligently that we involuntarily supply it ourselves. At the same time, we supply another element the artist himself withholeds: the knowledge that the moment he has chosen to represent is in some way climatic. There is absolutely no narrative factor in the painting. Yet the comradely concentration on the task of hammering a piece of red-hot iron is so convincing – because of the extraordinarily balanced composition, in which each action has its counterweight – that we involuntarily experience a sense of communication between the workers.

Fred Licht, from his book Goya, Abbeville Press, page 335

The Forge is undoubtedly the most complete statement of Goya's late style. it is his only painting that is an integral whole rather than a meaningful fragment torn out of an inscrutable context.

Fred Licht, Goya, Abbeville Press, page 335