Lorenzo Orengo has portrayed the engineer Whitehead near his bench with a vice, while on the pedestal there is a bas-relief representing a steam machine, which has been invented by the same engineer. The sculptor takes to the extreme the bourgeois pragmatism, whose most important values were the social and professional roles, and suggests the idea that a man can identify himself completely by his work. Under this point of view, the engineer’s portrait gains historical and social importance, while his wife’s sculpture is, from the stylistic point of view, one of the most important exemplars of the bourgeois Realism: the sculptor has faithfully portrayed not only the woman’s physiognomy, but also her clothes, depicting laces and transparencies with a lot of virtuosity.
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