Apollo: It's good to hear your community is coming along well.
Fire Blanket: You see, this does work. You don't need authority.
Apollo: Yes. I still think it is better to have law and order but I can see we will never agree on this. Fire Blanket: I think we won't.

-Correspondence recorded between New Monument and The Anarchist Commune

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I've always like “The Commune” as a painting. The vivid imagery used to depict the commune itself really brings the place to life, standing for everything you could want from the place. The happiness just oozes from the place, and really reflects the image that Fire Blanket worked their way towards creating.

The foreground has some lovely brush work - you can just tell it's Fire silhouetted against the plains, meeting with the envoy from Monument to discuss some matter or other. The date of the work suggests the meeting depicted was to do with the de-escalation of military hardware, particularly in relation to the reduced number of guns available in both civilisations. Both parties are notably less armed than they used to be, putting the time of the painting relatively late in these events.

The other notable feature that allows us to calculate the date of the work is the placement of the back wall; the commune is a relatively small city in the picture, which gives us a cut off point towards the end of the negotiations. Fire Blankets guidance meant the city grew quite substantially in this period, so the paining is definitely from before then.

Overall I believe this is on of Cool Dry Place's finest works from the period, and we're very lucky to have it in our collection.