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.

The reality of urban life was that precious few who migrated from the country ever made their fortune in the city. For the great majority life was a constant battle to avoid poverty that, in the long run, turned out to be their only reward. Just as there were social realists who painted rural poverty in the middle of the nineteenth century, so there were a few who depicted urban poverty in its closing decades.

During the mid-1870s, Jean-François Raffaëlli started painting the poorer residents of Paris and its surrounds. The Ragpicker from 1879 was a great success, and his work was promoted by the influential critic Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Raffaëlli’s elderly Garlic Seller from about 1880 is making his way across a muddy field just beyond one of the new industrial areas on the outskirts of Paris, his battered old wickerwork basket containing the garlic he hoped to sell. Behind him is his companion, a dog.

Raffaëlli painted these Parisian Rag Pickers in about 1890 using mixed media of oil paints and oil crayons.

In 1882, George Hendrik Breitner met Vincent van Gogh, and the pair went out sketching and painting in the poorer parts of The Hague. Among Breitner’s paintings of that campaign is his watercolour Distribution of Soup (1882), showing those from poor families queuing for free soup.

Most of Fernand Pelez’s paintings of the poor are deeply unsettling, often frankly depressing. His Homeless from 1883 shows a worn and weary mother and her five children living on the street. She stares from sunken eyes straight at the viewer, as her children huddle in filthy blankets and sacking around her.

Pelez’s painting became even more pointed, as in A Martyr – The Violet Vendor from 1885, showing a child of the street. One of the small bunches of violets has fallen from his tray. His eyes are closed, and his mouth agape: is he dead asleep, or simply dead?

In the late 1880s the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. This was Oslo’s main street at the time, and three years later was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.

The people are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers for the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Better known for his many paintings of schools and children, Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy’s painting of The Night Hostel or The Soup Kitchen (1891) shows homeless women and children being fed in what appears to be almost a prison.

In Denmark, Erik Henningsen’s Evicted from 1892 shows a family of four being evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

Prostitution isn’t the only occupation that has been claimed to be the earliest, and that claim wasn’t even made until the late nineteenth century. However, it certainly 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, prostitution only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money. London and Paris were renowned for the number of women who worked as prostitutes, catering for all classes and pockets.

Thoughts of the Past (1859) was the first of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, and remains one of his best-known works. It shows a woman standing by a window looking out onto the River Thames in London, and is a faithful depiction of the studio below that used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the time, in Chatham Place.

The woman and her surroundings contain rich clues as to her status: behind her, a gaudy cloak with some white lace hangs. The small dressing table is tatty and covered with cheap, garish jewellery. Potted houseplants straggle up for light from the window, and at their foot is a man’s glove and walking stick. She’s dressed for the bedroom, with her long red hair let down, and looks gaunt, her eyes tired and sunken. The view looks towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand embankment to the right, at the time a popular haunt for prostitutes.

In Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1863), the profligate woman in the foreground wears a torn and tattered red dress (detail below), although it’s faded rather than full scarlet. With her gaggle of unruly children and a babe in arms, she’s portrayed as a prostitute.

Like Manet’s notorious Olympia (1863) before, the contemporary surroundings and heap of clothes beside Henri Gervex’s Rolla (1878) ensured it was deemed immoral by the Salon jury. This was inspired by a poem by Alfred de Musset about a prostitute, and Gervex depicted her asleep in bed as her client gets dressed the following morning. In the end, the artist got a commercial gallery to exhibit this painting, where it attracted far more attention than it would have in the Salon.

Jean-Louis Forain’s candid view of endemic prostitution shown in his watercolour The Client (1878) surpassed those of Edgar Degas, and were later to inspire the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

One response to the popularity of Naturalism was Félicien Rops’ tender portrait of a low-end prostitute Down and Out in 1882. While she stands next to a sheet on the wall headed TARIF making clear her trade, a single small red flower adorns her flaunted cleavage.

In Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation from 1880-85, the man settling his bill is only seen by the hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive, looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade. This is one of a series by Gandolfo depicting the poor in the city of Catania on Sicily.

The theme of prostitution dominates many of the paintings of the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, who was also an author.

Just before Christmas 1886, Christian Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). He also painted other scenes from the book.

In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that is, of course, exactly what happens.

Albertine isn’t the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer: Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.

During Joaquín Sorolla’s period of Naturalist painting, he depicted the contemporary trade in prostitutes in Spain. His White Slave Trade (1895) is set in a bleak railway compartment, where four young women are asleep while being transported in the care of an older woman. In contrast to their guardian who wears black, the young women are dressed in bright-coloured Valencian regional costumes, and wear fashionable shoes. Their few possessions are stacked on the bench at the right, and include a guitar. The ‘slave trade’ to which the title refers is the movement of prostitutes between brothels, in this case from the city of Valencia to the port of Cartagena, then over to Orán and Algeria.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was another Norwegian who took up the cause with Krohg. He had been born in Hammersborg, a poor suburb of Oslo, but his paintings weren’t exhibited until after his death in 1922.

Forced into Prostitution, also known as Night Wanderer, from 1915, shows the artist’s wife Anna in the role of a prostitute in the city of Oslo. Here an odious-looking client with bushy eyebrows and a thick-set face is pressing against her from behind, wanting to pick her up.

Women in towns and cities were widely engaged in light factory work, commonly that involving the production of fabrics and garments such as spinning, weaving and assembly. Large numbers were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, the subject of this article.

Concentration of people in urban areas transformed what had been a small-scale household function into a sizeable service industry that was eventually industrialised by companies who have concentrated on the hotel trade. Individual washerwomen who might have been servants in households collected, laundered and finished clothing and linen that were then returned to the customer.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris, with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge. The bridge shown here connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town, probably one of the suburbs of Paris. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of works showing laundresses. Woman Ironing (c 1869) shows one of the army of women engaged or enslaved in this occupation in Paris at the time. She is young yet stands like an automaton, staring emotionlessly at the viewer. Her right hand moves an iron (not one of today’s convenient electrically-heated models) over an expanse of white linen in front of her. Her left arm hangs limply at her side, and her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. She is surrounded by pieces of her work.

Degas’ less gloomy painting of a Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) maintains the impression of this being protracted, backbreaking work, only slightly relieved by the colourful garments hanging around the laundress.

Washing, drying and ironing clothes was long and arduous, paying but a pittance. At the end of the day came exhaustion.

Fernand Pelez’s early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress from about 1880 is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Christian Krohg’s view, young women came to the city to work as seamstresses, who later ended up as prostitutes. The young woman seen in his Tired from 1885 is one of many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work. Krohg and others claimed that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient and drove women to seek alternatives. Prostitution was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

Eva Bonnier’s Dressmakers (1887) features two women dressed in plain working clothes, who are collaborating on the making of a dress for a special occasion.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

It took two world wars in the following century to start changing the division of labour between men and women.