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.

The early industrial revolution in Europe used existing forms of power, wind and water, but quickly outgrew their capacity and turned to coal to fuel its growth. The heat generated by burning coal turned water into steam, and steam powered engines to run industrial processes and to move goods, including coal from the mines.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coal mining grew greatly in the coalfields that had been discovered across northern Europe. Although some was quarried from open-cast sites, most production came from deep mines. Northern France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Britain had an insatiable need for hard-working, fit young men to work as miners in the towns and cities that developed in mining areas. 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.

Constantin Meunier is best known for his gritty paintings of coal mining and foundries in Belgium in the late nineteenth century. He started painting these motifs in 1880, when he was commissioned to paint industrial parts of the country, and continued until his death in 1905. Unfortunately almost all of these paintings are undated.

The similarities between Meunier’s Mining Area (above) and Black Country – Borinage (below) suggest that they are the same view, and that above may have been his original plein air sketch. The Borinage was one of the major coal mining areas in Europe at the time, and is in the Belgian province of Hainault. It was here that Vincent van Gogh lived between 1878-80. The tower at the left is the pit head, where trucks of freshly cut coal were brought to the surface.

Meunier’s painting of Miner at the Exit of the Shaft shows several miners enjoying a few moments to smoke and relax at the pit head. Three are carrying safety lamps, used to minimise the risk of underground explosions even though they had flames inside them. These were developed in about 1815, after a long succession of mine disasters caused by explosions, and weren’t replaced by electric lamps until after 1900.

In his Return from the Mine, two male miners stride back to their cottages after completing their shift underground. With them is a young woman, employed to perform supporting tasks, who is walking barefoot and holding up her wooden clogs.

Painted in 1887, The Carriage Driver shows another working woman, taking a short break from her duties. She appears to be sat by the pit head, and has a safety lamp by her left leg, making it likely that she too is in one of the mining areas.

One task largely performed by women was the movement of wagons containing coal or spoil (general rock debris). These two young women, termed Les Hiercheuses, did just that, and were painted by Meunier in about 1885-90.

Meunier also made monumental reliefs and sculptures to commemorate the miners, and this Triptych of the Mine, showing their Descent, Calvary, and Ascent, to parallel the Crucifixion.

Until its mechanisation in the twentieth century, coal mining was almost entirely manual. It also had one of the highest risks of death or injury at work. Those who survived the immediate physical dangers rarely lived long, as a result of destructive lung disease (pneumoconiosis) from inhaling dust when working underground.

As urban areas grew and were remodelled during the nineteenth century, demand for construction workers increased. Many of those who were drawn from the country found employment as labourers, and some were able to undertake more skilled jobs as carpenters. Several painters of the period showed insights into the working conditions in this industry, including George Hendrik Breitner who painted views of Amsterdam during its expansion late that century.

Breitner captured this in his undated watercolour sketch of Ground Porters with Carts. These were the jobs that immigrants from the country were often employed in, as physically demanding and dirty as their previous work on the land.

Building Site in Amsterdam is another of Breitner’s sketches of construction work, this time painted in oils.

In Paris, it was Maximilien Luce who painted some of the best insights into the rebuilding of parts of the city in the early years of the twentieth century.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Maximilien Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. These labourers are pulling on the rope to drive piles into the foundation of buildings on the banks of the River Seine. Although piles could also be driven by steam power, it was often cheaper and quicker to use labourers instead.

Luce’s Construction Site from 1911 shows the intense human involvement in the urban cycle of demolition and rebuilding.

This period also brought some vast works of civil engineering, such as the construction of the ship canal between Liverpool and Manchester in England.

The Excavation of the Manchester Ship Canal: Eastham Cutting with Mount Manisty in the distance (1891) is one of a series Benjamin Williams Leader painted showing the fruits of his brother’s engineering labours. This major canal was constructed between 1887 and 1893, and carries ocean-going ships from the estuary of the River Mersey near Liverpool 36 miles (58 km) into the heart of Manchester, in the industrial north of England. This view is set close to the seaward entrance, and shows steam diggers and railways being used to excavate and remove the spoil, some of which is building Mount Manisty to the left of centre. The canal remains in use, and is currently being further improved.

Many of those working in these industries increasingly felt exploited in the late nineteenth century, leading to social unrest and strikes, as I’ll show in the next article in this series.