During the nineteenth century, paintings depicting ‘real’ life of ordinary people became increasingly popular, first in what has become known as social realism, pioneered by Jean-François Millet, then Naturalism, championed by Jules Bastien-Lepage until his untimely death in 1884. Among other themes, these put the case for the rural poor, and the desperate poverty that those living in the country had to endure.

Look carefully at many of their paintings, though, and the underlying stories aren’t as simple. One of the most evident problems is that many of those campaigning paintings used models who had been carefully posed. Look at their hands, feet and hair and you’ll often see someone who appears remarkably clean and kempt with no evidence of prolonged and arduous manual labour, even clothes that lack the dirt and mud so typical of those who work and walk on unpaved tracks and ploughed fields.

At the same time, photographic portraits of the poor became popular among some who sought to advance the art of photography. There are some notorious examples of early photographers who were caught posing carefully selected models in deliberately misleading circumstances, demonstrating how the camera can be made to lie.

My small selection of paintings of country people from the nineteenth century is an attempt to show some that appear most faithful records that weren’t intended to support political views or attract praise at a Salon.

Jules Breton had been born and brought up in the rural village of Courrières, and returned there to paint intimate portraits of those who continued to live there, including this Young Girl Knitting, seen in 1860. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

His portrait of this Mother Feeding her Baby from 1863 shows her wearing clogs, and clothing that has seen better days. She is feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire in what can only be her normal domestic conditions.

Jean-François Millet had been born in the village of Gruchy, and was the first child of a farming family. Although his portrait of A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville from 1871 lacks fine detail to reinforce its authenticity, she’s clearly grubby and wasn’t painted in the studio.

Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers from 1879 shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War. This shows well the light factory work that was introduced to country areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who provided its labour force.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879 is an exception among these, in that it was not only submitted to the Salon of 1880, but won the artist a first-class medal. It was also supposedly painted from memory, showing an incident that the artist witnessed with a medical friend who was similarly called to assist with an injury.

Despite that, it shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions appear primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it looks filthy. It’s also rich in detail that appears authentic, from the boy’s shoe compared with that of the doctor, to the bald man standing in front of a treasured grandfather clock in the right background.

Of Bastien-Lepage’s many portraits of country people, his Nothing Doing from 1882 appears the most convincing. From his unlaced mud-caked boots to his filthy and frayed waistcoat, this young agricultural worker looks the part. Bastien had spent his childhood in the village of Damvillers, although he was the son of a local artist. He frequently returned to his home village to paint local characters, such as this boy.

The young woman in Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) has detailed features that appear true to life, in her bare feet with grubby and battered toenails, and hands that have seen hard work with the hook she holds.

Évariste Carpentier had been born into a farming family near the small town of Kuurne in Belgium. The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond.

Throughout the career of Léon Augustin Lhermitte he painted the working lives of farmworkers and country people. In his pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper from 1913, he shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a meal at its end.

Together these paintings build a dispassionate image of a countryside that might have been lacking in worldly goods, but was hardly starved and pestilent. And, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article, at times rural life could still be idyllic.

Those living in the country succeeded largely by self-help. Many skills were common knowledge, augmented by advice and help from the more experienced. If your roof was leaky, then you didn’t normally call in a roofing specialist, but repaired it yourself with the aid of family and friends.

It’s unlikely that the people working on the thatched roof of James Ward’s Overshot Mill (1802-1807) were specialist thatchers, whose services could only be afforded by the more wealthy.

Most tools were simple in design and construction, and rustic. Sharpening the blade of a heavy scythe used for mowing was performed by beating it with a hammer, as shown in Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s painting of The Haymakers from 1887. Finer blades were normally brought to a keen edge using a whetstone.

Working in iron and other metals required not only specialist skills but equipment possessed by the local blacksmith, who made and fitted shoes on horses, put rims on wooden wheels, and fashioned iron hinges for doors.

Francisco Goya’s Forge from 1817 is a superb depiction of the physically demanding work of the blacksmith. Its extensive use of black is also a herald of the Black Period to come in Goya’s paintings at the end of that decade.

These had changed little in the latter years of the nineteenth century, as seen in Alfred Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi from 1875, although a little more light is being cast in through its glass window.

Ernst Josephson’s Spanish Blacksmiths from 1882 shows a smith in the shredded remains of his white shirt, and his ‘striker’ to the right in his black waistcoat, with a horseshoe hanging below the roof of their forge in Seville.

Döme Skuteczky’s painting In the Smithy from 1897 shows another smithy, this time in Slovakia.

With the industrial revolution, hammers grew too large to be wielded by a man, and relied on first water- then steam-power. Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Iron Forge (1772) is one of his series of faithful portrayals of the small-scale technological advances of the day. It shows a group of workers forging a white-hot iron casting, using a tilt-hammer powered by a water-wheel. Also present is the wife and children of the iron-founder, stressing the family nature of these small forges at the time.

Not all metal-working was heavy and large-scale. Jean-Eugène Buland uses his Naturalist style to depict The Tinker (1908), who repaired damaged pots, pans, and domestic metal objects in a cottage industry that predated the Industrial Revolution.

Markets rose to become an important feature of many towns during the Middle Ages. Initially they provided the opportunity for farmers with excess to trade that for other produce or money, and for trades like bakers to ensure their supply of flour. By 1600, many across Europe were strictly regulated to prevent the involvement of intermediary traders, speculation and hoarding. In some, bells were rung to mark the start and end of trading, and doing deals outside that period was punishable by substantial fines. Both parties involved, producers and consumers, were keen to deal directly.

As some farms increased production to generate regular income from sales at market, samples of grain were brought for the buyer to inspect, and in larger towns and cities markets came to specialise in classes of produce, such as grain, fruit and vegetables, or meat. By the start of the nineteenth century, local laws and rules were relaxed to allow middlemen, dealers, who quickly became merchants, and often richer than either producer or consumer.

Smaller markets in towns remained more traditional, but most produce was then traded by increasingly affluent merchants in cities. In some European countries, the businesses of some merchants grew to enormous size, controlling commodity markets during the twentieth century.

Constant Troyon’s magnificent On the Way to Market from 1859 shows a couple driving their few cattle and a flock of sheep, with wicker panniers being used to transport young lambs. Judging by the trees, this is set in the autumn, when their livestock were in peak condition.

Petrus van Schendel’s Market by Candlelight from 1865 shows a town market in the late afternoon when the nights had drawn in. This young woman is selling small quantities of fruit and vegetables, probably from the family farm.

Smaller local markets were also dominated by seasonal produce. Léon Lhermitte brought this scene of an Apple Market, Landerneau, Brittany (c 1878) to life with his detailed realism. With a cart on the move in the background, and sellers ready with their scales, it shows the small-scale bustle of an otherwise quiet country town. Precious few men are in sight as these farmers’ wives sell small quantities of their fruit to locals.

Lhermitte’s later pastel of the Vegetable Market in St-Malo (1893) shows a wider range of farm produce, again largely being traded between women. Arcades like this were common alongside indoor markets selling anything from fish to crockery.

By this time, large cities such as Paris had famous markets.

This painting by Léon Lhermitte of Les Halles in 1895 shows the central market in Paris, described so well by Émile Zola in his novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris, 1873). This market is thought to have been founded in the eleventh century, and moved indoors into its halls in 1183. It grew steadily in size and importance as the main food market for Paris, and was housed in glass and iron in the 1850s. Most of its markets moved away in 1969, and the remains were demolished during the 1970s.

Larger markets gained their own indoor areas where regular traders could establish permanent stalls.

Harold Gilman’s oil painting of Leeds Market, from about 1913, shows an everyday view of one of England’s northern cities. This building had only been constructed in 1901-04, and housed the fruit and vegetable stalls next to a grand central hall. This was a far cry from markets of just a few decades earlier, let alone those of the seventeenth century.