The engraving, from the June 26, 1869 London Illustrated News, shows the interior of a "carpenters' shop"- really a cabinetmaker's shop if you ask me. The men are building furniture here, not houses.
The library where I work owns a fairly complete run of this periodical, so I located the image in question and scanned it at high resolution to get a better look at it. Here it is.
The level of detail in the image is wonderful. In the foreground, two men work at low benches: one at a saw bench ripping a plank of lumber, the other sitting astride the stile of a panel frame while mortising it with a mallet and chisel. As it so happens, I was working in just the same fashion just a short time ago, chopping mortises in the stile of the frame for the back panel of a book case I'm building.
Other delights abound in the image. The man on the foreground left is working on a large glued up panel, perhaps a table top. There are completed tables with lovely cabriole legs on the right.
I did a very small amount of manipulation of the image in Photoshop to clean up the image. I removed some wording from the bottom of the image: after the title, on the original it says "-see page 641", a reference to the article in which the image is mentioned. The article tells that the shop is part of a facility built on Vauxhall Bridge Road by the Guards, where soldiers could socialize and- in this shop- "learn the trade of carpentry."
If you'd like a print of the engraving to hang on your shop or office wall, I've uploaded the image to imagekind.com at full resolution (600dpi). From Imagekind you can select from a large number of sizes, paper types, mounting, matting and framing options. For $16 you can get a 16"x10.5" print on enhanced matte paper.
Here is the full size scan if you'd like to download and print it on your own. It is 6175x4048 pixels and about 25MB in size.
I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do!
