Social demands crossed over into Spanish art from the real world in the last decade of the 19th century. Cutanda was the most renowned representative of social painting, as he was awarded a first-class medal at the 1892 Fine Arts Exhibition for this canvas. In his interpretation, the unrest in the iron and steel industry is transformed into a cultured image whose size and rhetoric are those associated with historical epic, so making heroes of its protagonists. The artist thus ennobled their social conscience in a series of pictures inspired by the workers’ strikes at the blast furnaces, of which the Prado also holds another entitled Epilogue. Similar subjects attracted other artists who took a more expressive and dramatic approach, such as Juan Luna, José Uría and Manuel Villegas.