In a Salt Refinery at Rupelmonde

In a Salt Refinery at Rupelmonde, undated but held in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, extends Meunier's industrial labour imagery to the salt refining industry along the Scheldt estuary. Rupelmonde, a town at the confluence of the Rupel and Scheldt rivers, was a site of both salt refining and other chemical industries in the nineteenth century. Salt work was among the most physically arduous and chemically hazardous of industrial occupations—long hours in extreme humidity, heat, and chemical exposure characterized the labour conditions. Meunier's choice to document this less celebrated industry alongside the more visually dramatic coalfields and foundries reflects the systematic quality of his social vision: he was building a comprehensive pictorial monument to Belgian industrial labour in all its forms, not simply choosing photogenic subjects.

Salt refinery interiors would offer different lighting conditions from steel foundries—less extreme contrast, more diffuse industrial grey and white. The palette would lean toward cooler, more muted tones than the warm furnace-light scenes. Workers' forms would be defined through this softer industrial light, requiring subtler tonal modelling than the high-contrast foundry paintings.