Short answers, pulled from the story.
Constantin Meunier (the 12th of April 1831 - the 4th of April 1905) was a Belgian painter and sculptor who elevated the image of the industrial worker, docker, and miner to an icon of modernity. He made an important contribution to the development of modern art by treating subjects from industrial labor with the same seriousness previously reserved for religious or historical themes.
Meunier encountered Gustave Courbet's social realist painting The Stone Breakers in 1851 and concluded that sculpture could not adequately represent the contemporary social and artistic concerns that mattered to him. He gave up sculpture in favor of painting, which he practiced almost exclusively for roughly thirty years before returning to bronze in 1885.
The Constantin Meunier Museum is located in Ixelles, Brussels, in the last house where Meunier lived and worked. It was opened in 1939 and today displays approximately 150 of his works.
The Monument to Labour, acquired by the Belgian state for the Brussels Gallery, comprises four stone bas-reliefs representing Industry, The Mine, Harvest, and the Harbour; four bronze statues titled The Sower, The Smith, The Miner, and the Ancestor; and a bronze group called Maternity. The work was left unfinished at Meunier's death in 1905.
Meunier began studying sculpture in September 1845 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He studied under sculptor Louis Jehotte (1804-84) from 1848, and from 1852 attended the private studio of sculptor Charles-Auguste Fraikin.
Meunier was one of the co-founders of the Societe Libre des Beaux-Arts of Brussels and a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. He was also a freemason, belonging to the lodge Les Amis Philanthropes of the Grand Orient of Belgium in Brussels.