Most urban societies have had some form of police, in addition to soldiers and armed guards. In the Roman Empire these were known as lictors, employed to act as bodyguards to magistrates, who could also arrest suspects and punish offenders under the magistrate’s authority.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s Christian Dirce of 1897 refers to Dirce, a figure in Greek mythology who was killed by being tied to the horns of a bull. Accounts of Roman martyrdoms report that the killing of Christian women sometimes occurred in enactments of the death of Dirce, hence the scene shown here, in which a woman’s near-naked body is draped over the body of a bull. Siemiradzki shows the emperor and his entourage, including two lictors holding their fasces, symbolic rods and axes, gazing at the grim aftermath. The word Fascism is derived from the fasces, which are themselves often symbolic of Fascist groups.

Various police forces evolved across Europe after the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that they became recognisable in modern form, with organised professionals. Although by no means the first, the city of London’s Metropolitan Police force was created by Act of Parliament in 1829, and quickly became known as Peelers after the minister responsible.

These police forces adopted distinctive dress, typically dark blue, to set them apart from civil guard and other military formations. Most also wore headgear that made them instantly recognisable as officers of the law.

Jules Breton’s first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), shows their oversight by the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran.

William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) is set in the crowded and busy Paddington railway station in London that had only been completed a decade earlier by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The centre of action is at the right of the painting, where an arrest is being made, shown in the detail below. A man dressed in brown clothes is about to board the train, within which a woman stares aghast at the scene. Two Scotland Yard detectives, complete with top hats, are in the process of serving him a warrant for his arrest, the other stood ready with a pair of handcuffs.

Police forces came to the fore later in the century when industrial unrest spread across the coalfields of Europe.

One of the first prominent paintings of a strike is Alfred Philippe Roll’s Miners’ Strike, exhibited in the Salon of 1880 or perhaps the following year. It’s most probably based on a strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield of that year. It shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Mounted police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Police also became involved in the regulation of prostitution in some cities.

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. 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).

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.

In Denmark, Erik Henningsen’s first major painting bears the enigmatic title of Summum jus, summa injuria. Infanticide (1886). The Latin quotation comes from Cicero’s De Officiis I, 33, and literally means the highest law, the greatest injustice. It is a warning still used that strict application of rights and the law carries the danger of doing some people a huge injustice, and Henningsen’s narrative is an important example of a serious social and legal problem at the time.

Two labourers are digging a small pit at the side of a track across sand dunes. They are supervised by two policemen, one of whom keeps a written record. Behind and to the right is another policeman who holds a young woman by the elbow. She looks down as she is petting a dog.

The subtitle provides the clue as to what is going on. The labourers are trying to find the body of a baby, who is the subject of a police investigation. The young woman is the child’s mother. Unmarried, she had the baby in secret, smothered it at birth, and disposed of its body. She knows that if her baby is discovered, her punishment will be severe. But this was the only course open to her, as having a baby out of wedlock was against accepted religious and moral standards of the day.

The following year, Henningsen’s Farmers in the Capital (1887) shows migrants freshly arrived in Copenhagen from the country. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings.

Krohg’s The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889) 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. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

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.

José Uría’s After a Strike, from 1895, revolves around a strike and its violent consequence. The scene is a large forge that’s apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police, and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, apparently the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort a younger woman.

The role of police forces has remained as controversial ever since.

Compared to the number who have painted themselves in their studio, painting galleries have been an unusual theme for interiors. My examples start with a couple of fanciful images, but soon transfer to some of the more famous, as they went public during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Giovanni Paolo Panini’s paintings of Ancient Rome (1757, above) and Gallery of Views of Modern Rome (1759, below) are almost certainly wholly imaginary, although some of their figures look to have been identifiable as leading collectors of the time. These may have been an ingenious device for the artist to show a dazzling array of his own views, of course.

A more accurate reflection of the excesses attained by some is in Johann Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-77). This shows a section of one room in the palace that had belonged to the Medici family in Florence. It had only recently (1765) been opened to the public when Zoffany painted this for Queen Charlotte, who never visited Italy let alone the Uffizi, although she was the wife of King George III. Several of the paintings included are familiar, including some by Raphael, and it might repay careful study to determine whether the collection is accurate.

As the middle classes were gaining better access to pictures in the nineteenth century, the hoarding of paintings by the upper classes was becoming extreme. Robert Huskisson’s painting of Lord Northwick’s Picture Gallery at Thirlestaine House (1846-47) not only shows one quite modest collection of the time, but reinforces how few people were able to enjoy the paintings secreted in the mansions of the rich.

John Rushout, the second Baron of Northwick (1770-1859), moved his collection from Northwick Park to Thirlestaine House when it grew too large for his own residence. When he died in 1859, he had no children, and this collection was sold off and dispersed around the world.

William Powell Frith’s last great human panorama shows A Private View at the Royal Academy, completed in 1883. Although he was a Fellow from 1853 until his retirement in 1890, his can’t have been an easy relationship with the British art establishment. This work gives some insight into the frictions within the Academy, as Oscar Wilde is seen at the right holding forth about art, to the dismay of Frith’s friends nearby. Frith had opposed the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, and, like Frederic, Lord Leighton (also shown in this painting), was a great traditionalist.

For Henri Gervex, depicting A Session of the Painting Jury of the Paris Salon was subtle revenge for their refusal of his most famous work Rolla in 1878. The painting the jury are voting on here is a ‘classical’ nude, thus acceptable, compared with Gervex’s of a naked prostitute, thus deemed immoral.

At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, Louis Béroud emerged as the uncontested specialist in painting the interiors of galleries, specifically the Louvre in Paris. From then until the First World War, he seems to have painted little else.

At the Louvre (1899) is the earliest work of his that I can find showing the interior of the Louvre, although the pretty young lady posing beneath a painting of the deposition of Christ is merely sitting, holding her umbrella, and looking decorative. Nearer the nonchalant, even disinterested, guard is Correggio’s Venus and Cupid with a Satyr (also known as Jupiter and Antiope) from 1528, one of the gallery’s great treasures, and something of a favourite of Béroud.

If you have visited the Louvre, you will be familiar with the many copyists who work there. Some are students who are improving their skills by copying the Masters, but many are painters who sell those copies on. Béroud shows a copyist chatting to a man in The Rubens Room in the Louvre (1904).

He then seems to have become obsessed with painting copyists, and in An Artist in the Louvre with Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope (1908) returns to the Correggio. Note the use of a sheet of scrap paper under the copyist’s easel, to ensure that no drips of paint ended up on the floor. All but one of Béroud’s copyists seem to be women, although today you’re almost as likely to come across a man. I suspect that reflects the more limited opportunities for women to train as painters at that time.

He started catching his models during their more social moments, as with the discussion taking place in his Copyists in the Louvre (1909). The large painting shown here is Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717); to the left is Greuze’s The Milkmaid (1780), and to the right his Broken Pitcher (1785).

The Joys of the Flood (in the Medici Gallery) (1910) is probably the best of all Béroud’s gallery interiors. This time the copyist is the artist himself, the only man to appear in that role in these works. Rubens’ huge The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles (1621-25) bursts into life, as its water starts to flood the Louvre and its three nudes step out onto the floor.

Béroud had a close call with the police on 21 August 1911, when he had been painting a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and the original went missing. This was first noticed by Béroud, who reported the theft, and so became embroiled in the crime.

After his moment of fame, Béroud returned to painting his copyists. In his Painter Copying a Murillo in the Louvre from 1913, the only easel occupied is in front of Murillo’s The Young Beggar (c 1645).

Douglas Fox Pitt’s The Stafford Gallery from 1912 is an unusual watercolour with its elevated view recalling Spencer Gore’s Gauguins and Connoisseurs painted the previous year. While Gore’s painting (no image of which is in the public domain) shows a landmark exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings in the same gallery, Fox Pitt shows an early exhibition of the Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson held from 9 March 1912. The painting shown most prominently is Fergusson’s La Dame aux Oranges (c 1908–09), whose location is now unknown. To the left is The Red Shawl (1908), and on the right is Le Manteau Chinois (1909).

Finally, this painting by Sir John Lavery (1856–1941) of The Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery, 26 June 1926 (1929) was commissioned by the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen to mark the opening of these new galleries by King George V. The King and Queen are seen on the dais, beneath a few of the Tate’s collection of paintings by JMW Turner. Duveen’s name is recorded in the inscription above the doorway.

Until well into the twentieth century, many of the people across Europe and North America spent time in church. For most communities, a local church was its centre, where everyone underwent their rites of passage from christening to funeral. Church registers recorded those events, and are now a rich source of information for genealogists and historians. Relatively few painters seem to have recorded the interiors of churches, though. Here are some examples.

Royal weddings were full of pageantry, as shown in William Frith’s painting of the Marriage of the Prince of Wales, 10 March 1863, completed in 1865. This took place under the watchful eye of the groom’s mother, Queen Victoria (on the balcony at the upper right), who seems to be attracting as much attention as the wedding in progress below her. The groom was to become King Edward VII on the death of the Queen; his bride was Alexandra of Denmark, who was only eighteen at the time. The ceremony took place in Saint George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, which must be one of the grandest chapels in Britain.

Marià Fortuny painted this intricately detailed view of a contrasting Spanish Wedding in 1870. The scene is the interior of a sacristy, where a wedding party is going through the administrative procedures of the marriage ceremony. The groom is bent over a table, signing a document, while the bride behind him (holding a fan) is talking to her mother. The rest of the wedding party waits patiently, but a woman at the back of the small group turns towards a penitent, who stands to the right of the group. He carries an effigy of the soul burning in flames, hardly appropriate for the occasion.

Elizabeth Nourse was born into a Catholic family, and appears to have remained a devout believer all her life. In 1890 she seems to have visited central Italy, where she painted the superb frescoes in the Papal Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in The Church of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Paul César Helleu’s Interior of the Basilica of Saint-Denis (c 1891) is an example of his interest in churches and their stained glass, which included Reims Cathedral. The Basilica of Saint-Denis was the burial place for almost every French king between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, and now lies within the north of the city of Paris, although Saint-Denis was formerly its own city. The window shown is that of the north transept, featuring the tree of Jesse; a south transept rose shows the Creation.

It was the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer who took greatest interest in church interiors.

Backer’s Churching (1892) shows a traditional ceremony in which a woman who has just completed the confinement following the birth of her child is received back at church, where she gives thanks for the survival of her baby and herself, and prays for their continuing health. This is believed to show the sacristy to the left of the altar in Tanum Kirke, in Bærum, Norway.

The next event in the life of mother and baby is shown in Backer’s Christening in Tanum Church (1892), one of her most sophisticated and greatest paintings which must be among the finest paintings in Post-Impressionism.

This looks both outward and inward. The left of the canvas takes the eye deep, through the heavy wooden church door to the outside world, where a mother is bringing her child in for infant baptism. The rich green light of that outside world colours that door and inner wood panelling, and the floorboards and perspective projection bring the baptismal party in. At the right, two women are sat in an enclosed stall waiting for the arrival of the baptismal party. One has turned and partly opened the door to their stall in her effort to look out and see the party enter church.

Of the many later paintings she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909). Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) giving them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

Known now for his pioneering paintings of New York skyscrapers, Colin Campbell Cooper also visited Britain and painted The Interior of Lincoln Cathedral in about 1905. This shows the area of the organ in this English cathedral dating from 1088. The organ shown had only recently been installed by the classical organ-builder Henry Willis. Cooper captures particularly well the lofty and distinctive vaulted ceiling and incoming shafts of light.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte had painted a few religious works earlier in his career, but his late pastel of The Prayer, the Church of Saint-Bonnet (before 1920) is probably the most moving. Odilon Redon and other contemporary pastellists also depicted stained glass windows to great effect.

At the start of the First World War, the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, where the Kings of France were once crowned, had been commissioned as a hospital and demilitarised. German shells hit the cathedral during opening engagements on 20 September 1914, setting alight scaffolding, and destroying some of the stonework. The fire spread through woodwork, melting the lead on the roof, and destroying the bishop’s palace. The French accused the Germans of the deliberate destruction of part of its national and cultural heritage.

Georges Rochegrosse’s Interior of the Cathedral of Reims in Flames (1915) casts this in a curious combination of the physical reality of the shattered masonry and fire, the ancient glory of the cathedral’s stained glass, and an Arthurian figure (possibly the Madonna herself) reaching up to seek divine intervention.

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