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

Although few of those who migrated to the towns and cities from the countryside prospered as a result, there were sufficient examples to lure others to take their chances. For a young woman, success could come through the growing world of fashion.

The foot of the ladder was the greatest challenge: how to make the break from the worn-out worker shown in Christian Krohg’s Tired from 1885. This young seamstress was one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. A few of them had the good fortune to be discovered and taken up into a small dressmaker’s.

They might then enter the world of Moritz Stifter’s New Dress from 1889. Every face is smiling here, some perhaps a little vacuously, as an affluent young woman tries on a new dress, with its incredibly small waist. Although this room is full of fabric and the trappings of dressmaking, including the mandatory sewing machine, no one actually appears to be making anything.

A few specialised in making hats, as shown in Edgar Degas’ The Millinery Shop (1879/86). While husbands and partners were expected to pay for a woman’s hats, their choice was hers, and hers alone.

Jean Béraud’s fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées is enjoying her success, and carrying her work in two large hatboxes. She has also attracted the attention of the well-dressed man in a top hat behind and to the left of her.

Les Modistes (Two Milliners in the Rue du Caire, Paris) from 1885-86 is one of Paul Signac’s transitional paintings to Seurat’s Divisionism. These two young milliners are busy making fashionable hats and making their way into bourgeois life.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot’s At the Milliner (1901) shows the milliner in a mirror at the right.

Millinery was one of the staples of fashion houses like that of Paquin, whose success was characteristic of the late nineteenth century, and shown in Henri Gervex’s Five Hours at Paquin’s from 1906.

The purpose of these expensive hand-made hats was for show, when the lady was seen in appropriate surroundings. Jeanniot’s painting of the patrons of one of the most fashionable hotels in Paris shows all the hats out on parade in the inner garden of the Paris Ritz in fine weather.

Béraud’s Workers leaving the Maison Paquin (1907) shows the ladies who worked in Jeanne Paquin’s highly successful fashion house in the Rue de la Paix, as they left work at the end of the day.

A select few were fortunate enough to marry into the middle class and forge a more secure future for themselves.

Béraud’s After the Service at the Church of Sainte-Trinité (the ‘American Cathedral’) (c 1900) shows affluent Franco-American society at the turn of the century, and the prominence of hats and clothes.