This is the summary and contents for the series titled Urban Revolutionaries showing paintings of the urban growth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America.

The lure of city life was all about the promise of material goods and wealth, fine clothes, and smart carriages, all the things that were lacking in rural life. By 1780, Paris had trebled in size from that of the early fourteenth century, to reach a population of 650,000. Its accelerated growth during the nineteenth century saw it grow to 2.7 million in 1901. This was enabled by the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

Introduction

During these centuries, the majority of those who had farmed the country abandoned their homes and livelihoods for a fresh start in the growing cities. This Danish family group has just arrived in the centre of Copenhagen, and stick out like a sore thumb, with their farm dog and a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods.

1 Leaving the country

Those who arrived from the country found towns and cities to be alien places. Although many were extensively redeveloped during the nineteenth century, common people were often forced into cramped slums away from their grand buildings and streets, such as these tenements for immigrants in New York City.

2 Living in the city

Urban areas had to provide paid work, often in mills and factories. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract coal, and again where iron ore was readily available.

3 Factories

Industry turned to coal to fuel its growth, and mining expanded in the coalfields across northern Europe. Industrial nations developed an insatiable need for young men to work as miners. In Britain alone, annual production of coal grew from 3 to 16 million tons between 1700 and 1815, and doubled again by the middle of the nineteenth century.

4 Coal and construction

Unrest grew among the workers in industrial towns and cities, leading to the Paris Commune of 1871, and a succession of strikes across Belgium in 1886. Those spread to other areas, resulting in violent confrontations between workers and the police and military.

5 On strike

Cities had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. While alcohol abuse also took place in the country, it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

6 Demon drink

Women were widely engaged in light factory work, such as production of fabrics and garments by spinning, weaving and assembly. Many were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, to service the middle and upper classes.

7 Women’s work

Prostitution was one of the most common ways for women to earn a living in the growing cities of Europe during the nineteenth century. Like bars and places of entertainment, it only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money, in cities like London and Paris.

8 The Oldest Profession

Few who migrated from the country ever made their fortune in the city, and most faced a constant battle to avoid poverty. Just as some social realists painted rural poverty in the middle of the nineteenth century, others depicted urban poverty.

9 Poverty

A few who migrated to the towns and cities did prosper. For young women, success could come through the growing world of fashion.

10 Rags to riches

As population density rose, so accommodation became crowded, the streets were often full of people, and vehicle traffic threatened the safety of pedestrians.

11 Crowds and traffic

As cities grew and swallowed up surrounding countryside, some substantial areas within them were retained as urban parks. But those who used them were overwhelmingly middle class, not the city’s workers.

12 Parks

Holidays were a privilege for the lower classes, and unpaid until legislation often as late as the twentieth century. Despite that, some workers saved all year and took a week’s unpaid leave to travel by railway to coastal and other resorts.

13 Holidays

Early cities were swept by epidemics of plague. In the nineteenth century, those were replaced by other communicable diseases including cholera, influenza and tuberculosis. Although improvements in sanitation brought cholera under control, epidemics continued to take their toll.

14 Epidemic

Although life in the country could be thoroughly miserable, stress of city life brought (and still brings) strain resulting from the stress of everyday life.

15 Angst

Before the arrival of railways in the middle of the nineteenth century, travel was slow, and holidays were optional. Most of the working class in cities were grateful to get one day off each week, and in many cases that was Sunday to be spent in church. Most employers allowed their workers as little time off as they could get away with, and those who weren’t there simply weren’t paid.

By the 1870s, cotton workers in Lancashire saved all year and took a week’s unpaid leave to travel by train to stay on the coast, in what were known as Wakes Weeks. These allowed mill and factory owners to shut production down for that week in the summer to perform maintenance, while their workers recuperated by the sea.

Public holidays, officially known as Bank Holidays because banks were allowed to close for the day, weren’t introduced in England until 1871, and even then consisted of just four days a year, and remained that few for the next century. Workers had no right to any paid holiday until 1938, when employers were required to provide them with one week a year in addition to Bank Holidays.

Eugène Lepoittevin’s Bathing, Étretat Beach shows French families enjoying the beach in 1864, and their first tentative steps in the development of beach and swimwear. Those shown are all middle class, well-dressed and hardly taking unpaid time away from the factory.

Similar groups are shown visiting the bathing resort of La Grenouillère in the summer of 1869, in one of Auguste Renoir’s masterworks from early Impressionism. This is located a short distance downstream on the River Seine from Paris, and easily reachable by train.

In 1882 at Le Tréport on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, Évariste Carpentier’s Le Tréport, Bathing Time again shows members of the middle class dressed in the latest beachwear. The young woman to the right of centre may still have her head wrapped in a bonnet, but you can see her lower legs and all her arm, almost to the shoulder. It’s noticeable that several heads have turned to look at her, as she walks in her sandals along the wooden walkway.

The railway came to Ramsgate in 1846, and with it the masses from London in search of a ‘cure’ from its waters. William Powell Frith holidayed there in 1851, when he made his first preparatory sketches for his painting of Ramsgate Sands (1854). On its beach is a more eclectic mixture of classes, reflected in their clothing and activities, although I still can’t see many from London’s factories or market-barrows.

In 1920 William S Horton painted this Punch and Judy show taking place on the beach at Broadstairs, Kent, a traditional family beach resort at the extreme eastern tip of the south-east coast of England. Most if not all are visibly well-dressed and hardly working class.

In 1902 Lovis Corinth visited the south coast of the Baltic, where he painted Swimming in Horst – Ostsee, now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

There are a few paintings showing lower classes in America away from their labours, though.

George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids from 1907 shows unruly youths at play by the water near a dilapidated wharf on New York City’s East River. These are from poor migrant families inhabiting overcrowded neighbourhoods in Manhattan’s East Side.

As more people were drawn from the surrounding countryside to populate growing towns and cities, the density of people within them rose. Accommodation became crowded, the streets were often full of people, and vehicle traffic threatened the safety of pedestrians.

The people that cities thrived on for their labour force were also its greatest threat. Outbreaks of infectious disease were common: in London, over fourteen thousand died from cholera in 1849, and a further ten thousand in 1853. From the middle of the nineteenth century, cities across Europe improved their sanitation and water-borne diseases became infrequent. The biggest killer of young adults remained ‘King Death’, tuberculosis, which spreads well in densely populated urban areas, and there were also local outbreaks of diseases like smallpox.

Extensive redevelopment of central Paris retained many of its open spaces, although in fine weather these got crowded, as shown in Adolph Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens from 1867. This appears to have been painted in homage to Manet’s Music in the Tuileries of 1862.

Many cities were just as crowded at night, as seen in Lesser Ury’s view of Leipziger Straße in Berlin, painted in 1889. Although street lighting was becoming increasingly common, it was inadequate for this hazardous mixture of electric trams (introduced in 1881), horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians. Accidents were frequent, and deaths not uncommon.

City markets such as Les Halles, the central market in Paris, depicted here by Léon Augustin Lhermitte in 1895, were packed with buyers and sellers for much of the day, as described by Émile Zola in his novel Le Ventre de Paris (1873).

Painting the crowded city streets was a challenge mastered by few, including Camille Pissarro for Paris and Colin Campbell Cooper for New York.

Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Spring from 1897 is a landscape composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

In 1902, just a year before his death, Pissarro painted this amazing view of crowds on The Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris.

In Cooper’s The Rush Hour, New York City from about 1900, the canvas is literally teeming with people, who are pouring along the street, packing the stairways and walkways to a station, and seething around booths and tramcars.

Cooper followed those crowds onto The Ferries, New York (c 1905), where they are as densely packed as they were in The Rush Hour above.

Cooper’s Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street) (c 1909) is one of his most famous skyscraper cityscapes. This shows the Singer Building or Tower, at Liberty Street and Broadway, that had only just been completed, and was still the tallest building in the world. Below in Broadway itself the street is packed with people.

George Bellows’ New York (1911) has a human horizon of figures walking past a white background, dividing the canvas into two. Above is a vague blur of buildings, below a cacophony of vehicles, stalls, and people.

Among the immigrants to arrive in New York City from Italy in 1896 was Giuseppe Michele Stella. Born in the small town of Muro Lucano, with a population of about ten thousand, he changed his name to Joseph, abandoned his medical studies, and became a painter of international renown. The shock of living and working among those crowds must have run deep, and between 1909-11 he had to return to Italy to recover.

Berlin’s Spittelmarkt, painted here by Paul Hoeniger in 1912, mixes early motor cars, horse-drawn wagons, trams, and people walking in every direction, all without any road markings or traffic controls.

Winter weather was no deterrent either, as Maximilien Luce demonstrates in his painting of The Gare de l’Est in Snow from 1917.