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.

Prostitution isn’t the only occupation that has been claimed to be the earliest, and that claim wasn’t even made until the late nineteenth century. However, it certainly 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, prostitution only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money. London and Paris were renowned for the number of women who worked as prostitutes, catering for all classes and pockets.

Thoughts of the Past (1859) was the first of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, and remains one of his best-known works. It shows a woman standing by a window looking out onto the River Thames in London, and is a faithful depiction of the studio below that used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the time, in Chatham Place.

The woman and her surroundings contain rich clues as to her status: behind her, a gaudy cloak with some white lace hangs. The small dressing table is tatty and covered with cheap, garish jewellery. Potted houseplants straggle up for light from the window, and at their foot is a man’s glove and walking stick. She’s dressed for the bedroom, with her long red hair let down, and looks gaunt, her eyes tired and sunken. The view looks towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand embankment to the right, at the time a popular haunt for prostitutes.

In Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1863), the profligate woman in the foreground wears a torn and tattered red dress (detail below), although it’s faded rather than full scarlet. With her gaggle of unruly children and a babe in arms, she’s portrayed as a prostitute.

Like Manet’s notorious Olympia (1863) before, the contemporary surroundings and heap of clothes beside Henri Gervex’s Rolla (1878) ensured it was deemed immoral by the Salon jury. This was inspired by a poem by Alfred de Musset about a prostitute, and Gervex depicted her asleep in bed as her client gets dressed the following morning. In the end, the artist got a commercial gallery to exhibit this painting, where it attracted far more attention than it would have in the Salon.

Jean-Louis Forain’s candid view of endemic prostitution shown in his watercolour The Client (1878) surpassed those of Edgar Degas, and were later to inspire the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

One response to the popularity of Naturalism was Félicien Rops’ tender portrait of a low-end prostitute Down and Out in 1882. While she stands next to a sheet on the wall headed TARIF making clear her trade, a single small red flower adorns her flaunted cleavage.

In Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation from 1880-85, the man settling his bill is only seen by the hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive, looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade. This is one of a series by Gandolfo depicting the poor in the city of Catania on Sicily.

The theme of prostitution dominates many of the paintings of the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, who was also an author.

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. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

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). He also painted other scenes from the book.

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.

During Joaquín Sorolla’s period of Naturalist painting, he depicted the contemporary trade in prostitutes in Spain. His White Slave Trade (1895) is set in a bleak railway compartment, where four young women are asleep while being transported in the care of an older woman. In contrast to their guardian who wears black, the young women are dressed in bright-coloured Valencian regional costumes, and wear fashionable shoes. Their few possessions are stacked on the bench at the right, and include a guitar. The ‘slave trade’ to which the title refers is the movement of prostitutes between brothels, in this case from the city of Valencia to the port of Cartagena, then over to Orán and Algeria.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was another Norwegian who took up the cause with Krohg. He had been born in Hammersborg, a poor suburb of Oslo, but his paintings weren’t exhibited until after his death in 1922.

Forced into Prostitution, also known as Night Wanderer, from 1915, shows the artist’s wife Anna in the role of a prostitute in the city of Oslo. Here an odious-looking client with bushy eyebrows and a thick-set face is pressing against her from behind, wanting to pick her up.

Women in towns and cities were widely engaged in light factory work, commonly that involving the production of fabrics and garments such as spinning, weaving and assembly. Large numbers were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, the subject of this article.

Concentration of people in urban areas transformed what had been a small-scale household function into a sizeable service industry that was eventually industrialised by companies who have concentrated on the hotel trade. Individual washerwomen who might have been servants in households collected, laundered and finished clothing and linen that were then returned to the customer.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris, with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge. The bridge shown here connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town, probably one of the suburbs of Paris. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of works showing laundresses. Woman Ironing (c 1869) shows one of the army of women engaged or enslaved in this occupation in Paris at the time. She is young yet stands like an automaton, staring emotionlessly at the viewer. Her right hand moves an iron (not one of today’s convenient electrically-heated models) over an expanse of white linen in front of her. Her left arm hangs limply at her side, and her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. She is surrounded by pieces of her work.

Degas’ less gloomy painting of a Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) maintains the impression of this being protracted, backbreaking work, only slightly relieved by the colourful garments hanging around the laundress.

Washing, drying and ironing clothes was long and arduous, paying but a pittance. At the end of the day came exhaustion.

Fernand Pelez’s early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress from about 1880 is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Christian Krohg’s view, young women came to the city to work as seamstresses, who later ended up as prostitutes. The young woman seen in his Tired from 1885 is one of many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work. Krohg and others claimed that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient and drove women to seek alternatives. Prostitution was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

Eva Bonnier’s Dressmakers (1887) features two women dressed in plain working clothes, who are collaborating on the making of a dress for a special occasion.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

It took two world wars in the following century to start changing the division of labour between men and women.

Over the last four months, I have posted a series of twenty articles about paintings showing rural life in Europe between 1500 and the 1920s. At the start of that period, countries across Europe were overwhelmingly rural, with about 80% of their people living in the countryside and engaged almost entirely in agricultural work. By the end of the nineteenth century that had reversed, with 80% living and working in cities and towns. This new series looks at where all those people went to live and work, the towns and cities, and what happened to them there.

Cities are of ancient origin. In its heyday, the city of Babylon had a population exceeding 200,000 and covered an area of about 3.5 square miles. Paris, the largest city in Europe in the early fourteenth century, had only just reached that size, and even now modern Paris has only ten times the population it had in 1328. By 1780, Paris had trebled in size, to a population of 650,000, and its accelerated growth during the nineteenth century saw it grow to 2.7 million in 1901.

Conventional wisdom holds that the size of cities is primarily limited by the population required to remain in the country to produce food for those in the city, and the city’s limited employment prospects. The first was changed dramatically by the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and the second by the ‘Industrial Revolution’. As we saw in the previous series, there wasn’t any discrete revolution in agriculture, but a prolonged series of improvements in yield. The Industrial Revolution started in rural areas, close to sources of its raw materials such as coal for energy and ores for the production of metal.

Cities were also vulnerable to depopulation, as the result of destruction in war, natural disasters, and epidemics including the Black Death and other outbreaks of plague, cholera and other infectious diseases that swept Europe from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century. They were also dependent on reliable supplies of food, and years with bad harvests could have significant impact on the growth of cities, even when they had a range of supply areas and good food security.

Nevertheless, with improvements in agriculture and the rise of manufacturing industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, towns and cities across Europe grew by attracting people from the country, and by their own increasing birth rate.

The lure of city life is well summarised in Jean Béraud’s fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées. This was all about the promise of material goods and wealth, fine clothes, and smart carriages, all the things that were lacking in rural life.

Artists like William Hogarth had been moralising about the dangers of this since the early eighteenth century, in visual stories such as his Harlot’s Progress.

Its general outline is of an innocent country girl, Moll Hackabout, who comes to London, and immediately falls into the hands of a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Moll becomes the kept mistress of a wealthy merchant, but later slides into common prostitution. She’s arrested, and ends up in London’s Bridewell Prison. Having earlier contracted syphilis, that disease progresses, steadily killing her. She finally dies at the age of 23, mourned only by her fellow prostitutes.

Moll Hackabout is first shown arriving at the Bell Inn, Cheapside, dressed in the fine bonnet and white dress of an innocent country girl. She’s seen being inspected by Elizabeth Needham, a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Hogarth gives the latter black skin lesions as a mark of longstanding syphilis, and her face is aged.

In the doorway at the right is an equally notorious rake, Colonel Francis Charteris, and his pimp John Gourlay, who are also taking an interest in the arrival of a fresh young innocent. In Moll’s luggage is a symbolic dead goose, suggesting her eventual death from gullibility. The address on the label attached to the dead goose reads “My lofing cosen in Tems Stret 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.

Behind Moll, an itinerant preacher is engrossed in spreading the message to his small ad hoc congregation in the back of a covered wagon. In front of that a pile of pots is just about to collapse, as is Moll’s life.

I’m sure those prospects weren’t in the minds of Erik Henningsen’s Farmers in the Capital (1887) when this country family first arrived in Copenhagen, complete with their large chest and farm dog. Around them city-dwellers are dressed fashionably, and stare at the outsiders with their rough clothing and filthy wooden clogs.

What these migrants found was different from the stories they had heard.

Frits Thaulow’s The Smoke from 1898 shows a suburb overwhelmed by the smoke, with houses crammed up against the factory walls. Few cities enforced any separation between industrial areas and housing, and there weren’t restrictions on the discharge of smoke even in densely populated zones. The water surface is also grimy and lacks the artist’s distinctive intricate reflections.

Children found their work very different from that in the country. Instead of looking after livestock and gleaning, they found themselves working long hours in demanding and often hazardous surroundings.

Joan Planella i Rodríguez’ The Little Weaver (1882-89) is a superb Naturalist painting with strong social content. This is a replica of the artist’s original completed in 1882. It shows a young girl working at a large and complex loom in Catalonia, as a man lurks in the background, keeping a watch over her. Machinery had no safety guards, and industrial accidents were commonplace.

Oslo, like other major Nordic cities, was small by comparison with Paris, and even in 1900 had a population of just 230,000, about the same size as Babylon at its height. Yet its growth in the nineteenth century was concerning many, including the artist and writer Christian Krohg.

His Tired from 1885 was part of a longer-term exploration of the theme of fatigue and sleep, particularly among mothers. The young woman seen here is no mother, but a seamstress, one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work.

Home work as a seamstress was seen at this time as the beginning of the descent into prostitution, a major theme in Krohg’s work. The paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives, which all too often led to prostitution. During the 1880s, therefore, in some countries in Europe, the sewing machine was seen as a precursor to a woman’s moral downfall, the top of the slippery slope.

Just before Christmas 1886, 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’s exactly what happens.

Albertine is not 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 mottley 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.

Most of those who moved into the cities left relatives behind. Although their homes in the country may have been primitive, they realised that in the city they needed a constant supply of money to avoid falling into debt and risking eviction.

This family of four has just been Evicted, as shown by Erik Henningsen in 1892. With them in the snowy street are their meagre possessions, including a saw implying the father is a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

For every young woman who succeeded as a fashionable milliner, there must have been thousands who became trapped in prolonged, exhausting labour, and a few who lost everything.

This young mother and child in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 have shacked up in a hovel. A pair of bourgeois ladies have arrived to do their bit for charity, without which the mother and child would have starved and died of disease.

In the coming weeks and months, I aim to bring paintings of the reality of life for urban revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I hope you will join me.