In the fall of 1972, Ironworkers: Noontime, by Thomas Anshutz (Fig. 1), brought $250,000, the highest price ever paid for an American painting at auction.1 However, long before this small painting became a monetary star, Ironworkers: Noontime was regarded as Anshutz's most interesting and ambitious work. In it, two dozen male figures are arranged in as many poses; men converse, squabble, or sit and rest in the sun with their arms raised, lowered, pumping, carrying, reaching, or flexing. The painting is a grouping of class sketches, frozen in strong sunlight, along the exterior wall of an iron mill.2 Red and ochre paint touch the surface throughout, but the tone of the painting, like the clothes of the workers, is predominantly brown. It is a pragmatic, reportorial painting, a precursor of the Ash Can School. Anshutz painted for thirty years after Ironworkers, but he never again tackled a composition as complex or a subject matter as innovative. What caused Anshutz to abandon his painterly ambition—and why is this painting of such significance?Anshutz was familiar with John F. Weir's Gun Factory and Walter Shirlaw's Toning of the Bell when he painted Ironworkers: Noontime. He was certainly influenced by Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip and perhaps by Eastman Johnson's Old Stagecoach. However, the significance of Ironworkers: Noontime, its naturalism and clarity, its appropriate, terse, direct style suggests that Anshutz used photographs as “aides-mémoires.” Consequently, it can only be properly understood if one is aware of Anshutz's contacts and experiments with the photograph.