Léger’s series of gouaches and oils on the theme of construction workers is one of his best-known projects of the 1940s and early 1950s, culminating in the large-scale Les Constructeurs (1951) in the collects ion of the Pushkin Museum of Replica Handbags s in Moscow.

As the artist famously stated, it was the sight of men swaying on the steel girders of a construction site that inspired the series: "I saw man like a flea; he seemed still lost in his inventions with the sky above him. I wanted to render that; the contrast between man and his inventions, between the worker and all that.mes tal architecture, that hardness, that ironwork, those bolts and rivets” (Fernand Léger quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 158).