Across much of the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, this is the wettest part of the year. It’s when puddles are everywhere, and what used to be firm ground turns into soft deep mud. Footpaths and bridleways become deep tracts of mud, impassable in anything but high boots. Yet look through paintings of winter and you’ll notice that few artists before 1800 have depicted people, vehicles or animals in mud of any significant depth. This weekend I look at some of the more faithful accounts of this ingloriously muddy time of year.

In the early nineteenth century, streets in major cities in Europe including Paris spent much of the winter as muddy morasses. Enterprising poorer inhabitants took long planks to locations where the more affluent would try to cross those rivers of mud, and hired them out to enable the rich to stay cleaner.

This is shown well in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, where a whole family is taking advantage of one of these crossings. This spared their footwear and clothing the otherwise inevitable coating of mud. As you can see, their shoes, lower legs and clothing are amazingly clean, as if they might actually have been painted in Boilly’s studio rather than the muddy streets of Paris.

As realism and real-world scenes became more popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, Adolph von Menzel showed a more accurate view of the problem of muddy roads in his Hussars Rescue a Polish Family from 1850. It had clearly been a wet autumn, with the leaves still burning red and gold on the trees in the background. These mounted soldiers are helping the elderly women from their carriage across the muddy ruts of the road. The hussar in the foreground, with his back to the viewer, even has mud on his riding boots.

One of the first artists to have used mud in a more meaningful way is Jean-Léon Gérôme, in his 1868 painting of The Death of Marshal Ney. Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.

Gérôme shows Ney’s body abandoned after the execution, slumped face down and lifeless in the mud, his top hat resting apart at the right edge of the canvas. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance. The mud only reinforces Gérôme’s powerful image of a cold, bleak, heartless execution.

Mud also has its recreational uses, as children of all eras will attest. Ludwig Knaus’s painting of Mud Pies from 1873 shows a group of children in the evening, near Dusseldorf, Germany, who are enjoying play in and with the mud, which is less fun for the swineherd behind them.

While other Impressionists had been exploring the effects of transient light on the River Thames, in 1875, Giuseppe De Nittis examined the city’s muddy and rutted streets, in his painting of The Victoria Embankment, London. This wasn’t one of the older roads in the city either: the Victoria Embankment wasn’t constructed until 1865, and had only opened to traffic five years before De Nittis painted it.

Muddy roads in northern British cities like Leeds were one of the favourite settings for the nocturnes of John Atkinson Grimshaw. At The Park Gate from 1878 (above) and November from 1879 (below) are glistening examples.

There’s an old English proverb “February fill dyke, be it black or be it white”, referring to the rain (black) or snow (white) that usually falls heavily during the month and fills all the ditches. Benjamin Williams Leader borrows that in his February Fill Dyke showing the waterlogged countryside near Worcester in 1881.

Mud became a favourite effect in the Naturalist paintings made so popular in France by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) shows a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud.

But for real mud, deep enough for wheels and legs to sink in and cake clothing, I turn to central and eastern Europe.

Jakub Schikaneder’s The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse towing a cart on which a coffin rests. The woman, presumably widowed before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. It’s late autumn in a world that is barren, bleak, muddy and forlorn.

Józef Marian Chełmoński’s undated Market is one of the most vivid insights into country life in Poland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To reach this street market, carts are being drawn through a deep ditch full of muddy water. Market stalls are mounted on tables set in the mud, which forms the basis for everything.

Also undated is contemporary and fellow Polish artist Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski’s Meeting the Train. A couple of horse-drawn carts have gone to a rural railway station to meet a train. The winter snow still covers much of the ground, except where it has been turned into rutted mud on the road.

Had there been opinion pollsters during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no doubt we would have a good idea of the three most popular reasons for moving from the country to towns and cities. Evidence from paintings isn’t always reliable, and depends on the artist’s opinion. However, there are several good indications that I’ll consider here.

Perhaps the most detailed account appears in the many clues in William Hogarth’s opening image in his series A Harlot’s Progress. Sadly, some may have been lost when his original paintings were destroyed by fire in 1755, forcing us to rely on the engravings made of them.

Moll Hackabout, who is about to start her downfall as a harlot, is dressed in her Sunday best, with a fine bonnet and white dress to signify that she’s an innocent country girl. In Moll’s luggage is a symbolic dead goose, suggesting her death from gullibility. The address on a label attached to the dead goose reads “My lofing cosen in Tems Stret in London” (‘My loving cousin in Thames Street in London’), implying that Moll’s move to London has been arranged through intermediaries, who will have profited from her being trafficked into the hands of Elizabeth Needham, a notorious brothel-keeper and madame.

Hogarth thus presents Moll as a gullible victim of human trafficking to supply country-fresh prostitutes for London. Although he did paint a companion series to A Harlot’s Progress involving a man, he didn’t come from the country, so Hogarth sheds no light on the reasons for men and families moving from the country into cities, a theme that doesn’t appear to have been tackled in well-known paintings.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Robin of Modern Times (1860) is a wide-angle composition set in the rolling countryside of southern England, during the summer. The foreground is filled with a young woman, who is asleep on a grassy bank, her legs akimbo. She wears cheap, bright red beads strung on a necklace, and a floral crown fashioned from daisies is in her right hand. She wears a deep blue dress, with a black cape over it, and the white lace of her petticoat appears just above her left knee. On her feet are bright red socks and black working/walking boots. A couple of small birds are by her, one a red-breasted robin, and there are two rosy apples near her face. In the middle distance, behind the woman’s head, white washing hangs to dry in a small copse. A farm labourer is working with horses in a field, and at the right is a distant farmhouse. This most probably refers to the continuing account of how girls and young women from the country around London found their way to the city to become its prostitutes.

There were other more prosaic reasons that younger people migrated. Among them was a long period of harsh weather, the Little Ice Age, that lasted until the late nineteenth century.

Many British winters featured deep and prolonged snow, even in the south of the country, as shown so well in George Morland’s Winter Landscape with Figures from about 1785. This period was hard enough in towns and cities, but many farms and villages in the country remained isolated for weeks at a time. Even when there wasn’t snow on the ground, there were prolonged droughts and widespread crop failure.

Over this period, staple crops were also changing, with the rising popularity of the potato. Just as rural populations were becoming dependent on the potato, they were struck by the mould causing blight, in 1845. Within a year, much of Europe was suffering failure of the potato crop, leading to death from starvation in about one million in the Great Irish Famine, together with fewer deaths in Scotland and the rest of Europe.

Jules Bastien-Lepage shows the autumn harvest in a more successful year in his October: Potato Gatherers from 1878.

Another sustained pressure on those living in the country was the effect of land enclosure from 1500-1900.

John Crome’s Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20) shows the low rolling land to the north-east of the city that had remained open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed and ploughed up for agriculture. Crome opposed the enclosure of common land, and here shows the rich flora and free grazing provided. In the right distance some of the newly created farmland is visible as a contrast.

Enclosure concentrated productive land in the hands of those who owned it, and locked out the poorer labourers who had been reliant on common grazing.

While Britain was spared, across much of Europe the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a succession of wars fought largely in the country. Advancing and retreating armies seized what food they could from farms, and often burned and destroyed what they couldn’t remove.

Once Napoleon’s armies had been defeated at Leipzig in 1813, those of the other countries in Europe pursued them into north-east France, where there was a series of smaller battles and skirmishes fought in the French countryside, amid the terrified farmers and their families. Here Horace Vernet shows soldiers fighting around a burning farmhouse, as its occupants try to escape with little more than their lives. Their cattle are panicking, and it appears that the farmer himself has been shot, perhaps when trying to defend his family. A small boy buries his head into his mother’s apron.

As a result of those pressures, whole families abandoned their relatives, often those who were older and less likely to make a successful living in the city, and went to live in the growing towns and cities.

Erik Henningsen’s painted record of Farmers in the Capital from 1887 is one of few contemporary accounts. This family group consists of an older man, the head of household, two younger women, and a young boy. Everyone else is wearing smart leather shoes or boots, but these four are still wearing filthy wooden clogs, with tattered and patched clothing. The two men are carrying a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods, and beside them is their farm dog. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings.

The large brick building in the background is the second version of Copenhagen’s main railway station, opened in 1864, and replaced by the modern station in 1911. This demonstrates another significant factor in the attraction of people to towns and cities: the spread of railways across Europe.