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.

In the first of these two articles tracing the first century of railways in paintings from the early 1840s, I had reached Claude Monet’s views of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris before 1880. By this time few countries in Europe had no railways, and trains frequently conveyed artists from their studios in the cities out to the beaches and mountains, journeys that a few years earlier could have taken days rather than hours.

Although Norway was a greater challenge for the railway engineers, Frits Thaulow seized the opportunity to show the results in The Train is Arriving from 1881. The country’s first public steam-hauled railway was developed by the son of George Stephenson, whose Rocket locomotive had inaugurated the first steam railway in the world. Norway’s line opened in 1854, and during the 1870s progressively made its way to Trondheim.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh gave us The Blue Train (Viaduct in Arles).

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s undated Steppe shows a river in summer, with water levels at their minimum. Cattle are taking the opportunity to drink and cool off in the water. In the distance is the plume of smoke from a railway train, probably carrying grain and other produce from the Ukrainian countryside to one of the growing coastal cities for export.

The twentieth century brought the beginning of the end of the power of steam, marked in an unexpected twist of history. Between 1898 and 1900, a new railway station, initially known as the Gare d’Orléans, was built on the bank of the Seine at Quai d’Orsay, Paris. The first electrified urban railway terminal in the world, it was a star of the Exposition Universelle in 1900, where many Impressionist paintings were exhibited.

Victor Marec’s painting shows construction work being progressed in 1899, with a steam locomotive hauling construction trucks.

The Gare d’Orsay, as it became, started to suffer physical limitations in 1939, and its upper levels closed from 1973. In 1986 it re-opened as the most extensive collection of Impressionist art in the world, the Musée d’Orsay.

Maximilien Luce was one of the most expressive artists, who wasn’t an official war artist, to show scenes relating to the First World War. In his La Gare de l’Est (1917), a collection of wounded and battle-weary soldiers are shown at the entrance to this large Paris railway station.

The Gare de l’Est in Snow (1917) is even better-known, and a classic painting of falling snow in a large city.

Lesser Ury’s Nollendorfplatz Station at Night from 1925 shows the brilliant electric lighting around this busy railway station to the south of the Tiergarten, in one of Berlin’s shopping districts.

By this time, painting trains was becoming something of a sub-genre, particularly as steam trains were being replaced throughout Europe.

Eric Ravilious is one example of a twentieth century artist who painted motifs deeply embedded in the railway, in his Train Landscape from 1940.

A few narrative artists, including Joaquín Sorolla, set their stories inside railway carriages. My favourite among these is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (1874), rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, from 1874.

This is set in a railway carriage where there are two men and a young woman. She is dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes. Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.

Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, quite inappropriately, and very much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.

The young woman has apparently suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke.

Even for those well versed in the act of writing, it usually demanded a formal technique and took place at a dedicated piece of furniture, a writing desk. That often provided storage for the quills, pens and ink required, as well as a stock of paper. They could also be more elaborate and house a complete office with correspondence sorted into drawers, and pigeonholes that much later were models for software mailboxes. For the wealthy these more elaborate writing desks might be crafted by a joiner using exotic woods into a large bureau.

Antonello da Messina’s groundbreaking oil painting of Saint Jerome in his Study from around 1475 features an integrated office with shelving, although there are few books visible.

Gerard ter Borch’s Woman Writing a Letter from about 1655 shows a more modest desk doubling as a table. Its heavy decorated table cover has been pushed back to make room for the quill, ink-pot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

Vermeer painted at least two works showing women writing, of which the earlier is A Lady Writing a Letter from 1665-1666. The fur trimmings on her golden jacket confirm that this is no country bumpkin, but the lady of an affluent and well-educated house. Rather than looking down at her quill, she stares the viewer out, her faint smile of confidence lit by sunlight coming through the window off to the left. This illustrates the importance of placing a writing table or desk where it can be lit well by daylight, hence an association between writing desks and windows.

Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten (1837) reveals two contrasting types of writing desk: that at the right edge has a drawer and pigeonholes above to order papers and correspondence, while the long desk to the left of it has books, papers and writing instruments laid out across its flat surface, and a folding extension leaf to accommodate even more.

Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s painting of Kit’s Writing Lesson from 1852 shows this young character from Charles Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop struggling to write with a more modern dip pen. Sewing next to Kit Nubbles is the orphaned heroine Nell Trent, who is teaching him to write in the shop where he works.

Lesser Ury’s Woman at a Writing-Desk from 1898 is an everyday interior with a woman, a pianist perhaps, sitting writing at her bureau-style desk. The popularity of bureaux was perhaps one mark of the achievement of education.

Paul Helleu’s portrait of Madame Paul Helleu Seated at Her Secretaire, Seen from the Back from about 1900 is an unconventional view of his wife, who appears dressed for a social engagement rather than catching up with her letter-writing.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting by Félix Vallotton shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and its single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at her small bureau, backlit by the light streaming in through the window.

Pierre Bonnard painted a few interiors featuring a woman writing. The Letter from about 1906 is a conventional portrait of a well-dressed woman sitting at a desk or table to write a letter, and may have used Anita Champagne as the model. Her right hand holds a fountain pen with its own ink reservoir, a big step forward from the quill.

The New Necklace (1910) is one of William McGregor Paxton’s best-known paintings, and perhaps his most intriguing open narrative. A younger woman is sat at a narrow bureau writing. She has turned her chair so that she can reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace of the title. This is being lowered into her hand by a slightly older woman, in a dark blue-green dress, whose face and eyes are cast down, and her left hand rests against her chin. The writing desk of this bureau is hinged so that it stores vertically and encloses the drawers inside.

A last aside: not one of these writers appears to be holding their quill or pen in their left hand. Teachers of the past weren’t as accommodating.