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

By the late nineteenth century, the classical format of the triptych that had been developed for altarpieces, was being used to tell secular stories as well as more traditional religious ones. Some artists had abandoned the use of three hinged panels intended to stand unsupported, and set three paintings within a single frame to be hung on a wall instead. Popular layouts included a central theme with subordinate wings, and a sequence read from left to right.

Constantin Meunier’s undated Triptych of the Mine is intended as a tribute to long-suffering underground workers, and makes a parallel with triptychs showing the Crucifixion. The left wing shows their descent, the centre their ascent of Calvary, and the right their ascent to surface at the end of their working day.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Aino Myth (1891) is set in a gilt frame with quoted text from the Kalevala inset, similar to Arthur Hughes arrangement from 1856. This shows scenes from Songs 4-5 of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

The left panel shows the first meeting between Väinämöinen, the central figure and hero of the epic, and the young Aino, Joukahainen’s sister, in the forest. The perpetually ancient Väinämöinen there asks Aino to be his wife, to her shock and anger. The girl runs back to her mother in tears, but she offers no sympathy, telling her to stop crying, and to rejoice at the offer.

Aino remains distressed at the prospect of marrying such an old man, so wonders off, and becomes lost in the forest. She comes across the shore of a strange lake, where she sees the maids of Vellamo playing in the water, as shown in the right panel. She enters the water to wash, and drowns.

In Song 5, Väinämöinen goes to fish for Aino in the lake, and catches a salmon, which he tries unsuccessfully to cut up, so the fish slips back into the water. It then changes into Aino, who mocks Väinämöinen that he may have held her in his hands, but he cannot keep her, shown in the centre panel. She then disappears, and Väinämöinen travels to Pohjola to court the Maiden there.

In 1894, Édouard Vuillard painted this large triptych of Public Gardens, where its panels form a continuous landscape view and divide its figures into three groups. At the left is a group of carers with children; in the centre is a trio of ladies, one of them cradling an infant, and at the right is an older woman sat alone wearing the black of widowhood.

Léon Frédéric’s Ages of the Worker from about 1905 is set in the crowded streets of a Belgian town. The left panel shows men engaged in manual labour, including two who are moving heavy props from a mine. In the centre, a group of young boys are enjoying an improvised meal on the pavement as young couples and a miner move around them. At the right, women are feeding and caring for their infants. I suspect that Frédéric may have intended the work to be read from right to left, rather than in the more usual direction.

Fedir Krychevskyi painted this triptych of Life in the latter half of the 1920s, and its centre panel was the most acclaimed work among paintings by Ukrainian artists shown at the Venice Biennale in 1928. From the left, its panels are titled Love, Family and Return. It blends his own distinctive approach with Art Nouveau, Klimt and mediaeval wall painting.

The Memorial was painted by Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin in 1932 as a public commission for the town of Cahors in southwest France. Its single continuous scene shows a commemoration of the dead of the First World War, centred symmetrically on the town’s war memorial.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Kazimierz Sichulski painted several large triptychs of the Hutsul peoples, including this Adoration of the Shepherds in 1938. Although modern in style, this is laid out as a traditional Nativity, with the Virgin and Child in the centre, and shepherds looking on from its wings.

Reading larger polyptychs can be a greater challenge.

Among the most remarkable is The Ghent Altarpiece painted by the van Eyck brothers and their workshop in about 1432 for Saint Bavo Cathedral in Gent, Belgium. Its twelve panels are arrayed around the central panorama of the adoration of the Lamb of God. Its upper register features an array of figures with Adam and Eve outermost, and either Christ the King or God the Father at its centre. The lower register includes a gathering set against a continuous landscape background.

Polyptychs are also common outside Europe, including in East Asia where they were popular on screens. Some were also made from groups of woodblock prints.

Kitagawa Utamaro’s (喜多川 歌麿) Girl Fishers and Bathers from 1791 shows seaside activities at Enoshima. Although composed as a triptych with a continuous motif, the same topless woman appears in each of the sheets, making the whole a multiplex narrative. It’s not clear, though, whether it was intended to be read from left to right, or in reverse.