In the first of these two articles tracing the first century of railways in paintings from the early 1840s, I had reached Claude Monet’s views of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris before 1880. By this time few countries in Europe had no railways, and trains frequently conveyed artists from their studios in the cities out to the beaches and mountains, journeys that a few years earlier could have taken days rather than hours.

Although Norway was a greater challenge for the railway engineers, Frits Thaulow seized the opportunity to show the results in The Train is Arriving from 1881. The country’s first public steam-hauled railway was developed by the son of George Stephenson, whose Rocket locomotive had inaugurated the first steam railway in the world. Norway’s line opened in 1854, and during the 1870s progressively made its way to Trondheim.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh gave us The Blue Train (Viaduct in Arles).

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s undated Steppe shows a river in summer, with water levels at their minimum. Cattle are taking the opportunity to drink and cool off in the water. In the distance is the plume of smoke from a railway train, probably carrying grain and other produce from the Ukrainian countryside to one of the growing coastal cities for export.

The twentieth century brought the beginning of the end of the power of steam, marked in an unexpected twist of history. Between 1898 and 1900, a new railway station, initially known as the Gare d’Orléans, was built on the bank of the Seine at Quai d’Orsay, Paris. The first electrified urban railway terminal in the world, it was a star of the Exposition Universelle in 1900, where many Impressionist paintings were exhibited.

Victor Marec’s painting shows construction work being progressed in 1899, with a steam locomotive hauling construction trucks.

The Gare d’Orsay, as it became, started to suffer physical limitations in 1939, and its upper levels closed from 1973. In 1986 it re-opened as the most extensive collection of Impressionist art in the world, the Musée d’Orsay.

Maximilien Luce was one of the most expressive artists, who wasn’t an official war artist, to show scenes relating to the First World War. In his La Gare de l’Est (1917), a collection of wounded and battle-weary soldiers are shown at the entrance to this large Paris railway station.

The Gare de l’Est in Snow (1917) is even better-known, and a classic painting of falling snow in a large city.

Lesser Ury’s Nollendorfplatz Station at Night from 1925 shows the brilliant electric lighting around this busy railway station to the south of the Tiergarten, in one of Berlin’s shopping districts.

By this time, painting trains was becoming something of a sub-genre, particularly as steam trains were being replaced throughout Europe.

Eric Ravilious is one example of a twentieth century artist who painted motifs deeply embedded in the railway, in his Train Landscape from 1940.

A few narrative artists, including Joaquín Sorolla, set their stories inside railway carriages. My favourite among these is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (1874), rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, from 1874.

This is set in a railway carriage where there are two men and a young woman. She is dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes. Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.

Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, quite inappropriately, and very much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.

The young woman has apparently suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke.

Many of those who came to live and work in urban areas were refugees from the numerous wars and unrest that had spread across the mainland of Europe. Their livestock and crops had been stolen or destroyed as armies or uprisings passed through the country, leaving them the task of rebuilding and restoring their food supplies.

As many of those living in the towns and cities of north-east France discovered during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, they were no better off, and the riots of the Paris Commune that followed brought further problems.

Although only a boy at the time, Maximilien Luce must have retained vivid memories of the Commune, which he finally committed to paint in his A Street in Paris in May 1871 (also known as The Commune) in 1903-6.

With the rise of cities and industrialisation, the urban poor were in even greater distress than those in the country, while those who owned factories and businesses became obscenely rich at their expense. Social inequality drove movements aimed at ending such injustice, including those to improve the rights of workers. Strikes broke out in many of the poorest areas, such as the coalfields in the north-east of France and nearby Belgium.

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. Most of those present are barefoot. Mounted soldiers or police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Roll agreed to sell his painting to the state at cost price, on the understanding that it would be hung in the Ministry of Commerce, but he was tricked and it was sent instead to the local museum in Valenciennes, where it would bring less embarrassment. It has since become badly damaged, and is now only known from this reproduction, printed in Le Petit Journal of 1 October 1892.

This painting may well have influenced Émile Zola when he was preparing to write his novel Germinal, about a miners’ strike in the same coalfield as that painted by Roll. This painting and Zola’s novel also appear to have inspired a series of Naturalist works showing other strikes across Europe.

Robert Koehler’s masterpiece of The Strike in the Region of Charleroi was made in 1886, when there was a succession of strikes across Belgium. These started in Liège as a commemoration of the fifteen anniversary of the Paris Commune, but spread through industrialised zones to the region around Charleroi and Hainault.

Koehler shows a group of workers standing outside the smart entrance to offices (detail below). The top-hatted owner stands on the top step, one of his managers looking anxious beside him. The leader of the workers is at the foot of the steps telling the industrialist of the workers’ demands. Wives in the crowd are remonstrating with their husbands, one demonstrator is picking up a rock to use as a projectile, and at the far left is a young wife with her two children, looking anxiously at the proceedings. The situation is looking increasingly nasty, although there are no signs yet of police or troops, or of violent confrontation.

The strikes of 1886 led to the formation of a parliamentary socialist party in Belgium, and increasing industrial strife. This came to a head in 1893, when there was a general strike called by the Belgian Labour Party in a demand for universal male suffrage. It has been claimed that this was the first such general strike in Europe.

The general strike was called to start on the evening of 11 April, and is depicted in Eugène Laermans’ An Evening’s Strike, or The Red Flag (1893). Instead of Koehler’s small group of workers, the whole population, men, women and children, are on the march, and distant factories have fallen silent.

The Belgian government tried to quell growing clashes between strikers and troops, which by the 17 April led to The Riots of Mons shown here in an anonymous illustration published in Le Petit Journal the following month. The artist here concentrates attention on the civilian casualties. Between 13 and 20 civilians were apparently killed, here by the Civil Guard shown in the right background. The following day the government acceded to the demands, and the strike came to an end.

Strikes were prominent in other European countries at the time, including regions of Spain. In the Spring of 1892, workers in Valladolid, in north-western Spain, came out on strike.

José Uría y Uría’s painting After a Strike from 1895 is different from those above, in showing the inside of one of the factories. In the foreground, a worker lies apparently dead, his wife and young daughter grieving beside his body. Next to him is a large forge hammer, presumably the cause of his death. In the distance on the left are two policemen or civil guards, one of whom is comforting an older daughter. An opening in the factory wall at the right edge shows mounted forces outside. The likely reading is that the worker shown was killed during the violence of the strike, which has now been suppressed by troops.

Ramon Casas i Carbó’s The Charge, or Barcelona 1902 was dated by him in 1903, and refers to a strike that took place in Barcelona in the previous year. It shows a rider of the Civil Guard trying to avoid running over a member of the crowd, during a violent confrontation.

Another fine anonymous illustration from Le Petit Journal of 1 April 1906 shows continuing unrest in the French coalfields, here in The Miners’ Strike in Pas-de-Calais. Attention is drawn to the increasing strength and politicisation of strikers and their families, as they stride forward under numerous red banners, and the growing socialist movement across Europe.

One of the most disturbing paintings of strikes during this period is Stanisław Lentz’s Strike (1910). He shows three workers, who are presumably all involved in a strike at the time. At the left is an older man who is singing or chanting his commitment to the workers’ movements; in the centre is a younger worker, his arms folded in his determination not to be moved; at the right is an angry man who looks ready to fight for his rights, his right hand already clenched into a fist and ready to punch.

This weekend we’re seeking refuge from the winter in Saint-Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, in the company of some of the artists who painted its warm light. By 1897 it had good connections by express trains to Paris, and Paul Signac had just bought a house in the old port and moved there with his wife. Although Théo van Rysselberghe didn’t move to the coast until he retired in 1911, he was a frequent visitor.

Their friend Maximilien Luce had first visited Saint-Tropez in 1892 with Signac, and continued to travel south despite remaining based in Paris until his death there in 1941.

Luce became skilled in colour lithography. His finest print is this of Saint-Tropez from 1897. Here he substitutes dashes of colour for the small dots of Pointillist painting, with the aim of getting adjacent colours to interact and generate a glow of colour. This is taken from Divisionist theory as first developed by Seurat, then later by Signac.

That year, Paul Signac painted this unusual view of Saint-Tropez. Route de la Foux, also known as Golfe Juan, (1897). This looks back at Saint-Tropez from the main road running west towards Port Cogolin at the end of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Visible to the left is Saint-Tropez lighthouse, and its bell tower in the centre.

Signac started painting Saint-Tropez. The Terrace on 16 August 1898, aiming to complete it about ten days later. It shows his wife Berthe on the Italianate terrace that they had built at their house La Hune. It looks north, over vineyards and the old town of Saint-Tropez with its distinctive bell tower, the small bay beyond, to the Maures hills in the distance. The artist envisaged the lone figure being a young woman in the sunset of her life as one of the many victims of tuberculosis.

Although Signac started work on this view of the port of Saint-Tropez in 1901, he didn’t complete it until early the following year. At its centre is the bell tower, and the citadel looks down from its upper right. Its Tartane sailing vessels are being loaded with their cargo of barrels. Although its Divisionist technique and colours are thoroughly contemporary, it harks back to a tradition of port views by Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet.

The Harbour Entrance, Saint-Tropez from about 1902 appears to be one of Signac’s oil sketches with some colour tiling in the water.

Saint-Tropez, Tartanes in the Port from 1905 is one of the many watercolours Signac painted of these distinctive Tartanes in the harbour of Saint-Tropez, with its prominent lighthouse in the background.

Maximilien Luce continued to visit the Mediterranean coast of France, where he painted these Bathers at Saint-Tropez in about 1909. His colours are considerably less brash and dazzling than other former Neo-Impressionists like Théo van Rysselberghe.

Signac’s Saint-Tropez, Boat being Careened from 1920 is an unusual watercolour of a boat that has been deliberately grounded alongside the quay, to allow maintenance to be performed on its hull. As a longstanding yachtsman he had considerable insight into this procedure.

Pierre Bonnard began to visit the Côte d’Azur long before he started moving to Le Cannet in 1924, and went sailing in the Mediterranean with Paul Signac. Bonnard painted this view of an almost deserted Port of Saint-Tropez on a breezy day, with small wavelets forming on the water surface. The mole at the right ends in a lighthouse, which merges visually with the sailing ship’s superstructure.

Paul Signac painted this view of boats at low tide alongside Saint-Tropez, the Pier on 21 December 1923. Even with Spring tides, the tidal range at Saint-Tropez is little more than 30 cm (1 foot), suggesting these boats have been deliberately beached alongside the pier.

During the 1920s Saint-Tropez became the most fashionable resort in Europe when it drew Coco Chanel and a host of other celebrities. Later in the twentieth century it attained fame again as a ‘topless’ beach resort despite its mayor ordering its police helicopter to check that sunbathers were correctly dressed, and ‘clothing fights’ broke out with the police. I hope you have enjoyed this weekend, whatever you were not wearing in Saint-Tropez.

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.

If country folk were to be drawn into towns and cities, those urban areas had to provide paid work. During the early decades of the industrial revolution those jobs were often in mills and factories near the source of their raw materials or power. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract the coal, and again where iron ore was readily available. As canals and railways enabled supplies to be moved further and faster, towns and cities flourished as centres of manufacturing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, large scale iron production had already started in North America. In 1857, investors opened a site for the production of iron primarily for the growing railways across Canada, and a few years later William Armstrong painted those Toronto Rolling Mills (1864). By this time, it was the largest iron mill in Canada, and the largest manufacturing industry in the city, but it was soon surpassed by steel mills and shut down in 1873.

John Ferguson Weir took his dark realism before an unusual motif for American painting at that time, the hot, harsh, and dangerous world of the West Point Iron and Cannon Factory, in The Gun Foundry (1866). The moment shown here is the casting of a Parrott Gun, in the foundry responsible for making most of the large guns used by the Union forces during the Civil War. This was located to the north of New York City, where there was a rich supply of timber, local iron ore, and water power.

Weir’s Forging the Shaft is a replica painted in 1874-7, after the original of 1868 was destroyed by fire. It shows the same foundry, this time working the massive propellor shaft for an ocean liner, more a symbol of peace and trade than past conflict.

Adolph von Menzel’s The Iron Rolling Mill from 1875 gives a good impression of the crowded, sweaty, and dangerous environment in which iron and steel workers spent, and sometimes lost, their lives.

Production of steel on an industrial scale started after 1857, with the introduction of the Bessemer Process. Constantin Meunier’s undated Steel Foundry must therefore have been painted during the 1860s or later.

The dangers of iron and steel work are obvious today, and claimed many casualties at the time. Few employers had any concern for the safety of those who worked in these conditions, as there was a steady supply of young and able men to keep production rolling and profits accruing.

Not all industries were heavy, hot or sweaty. Charles Frederic Ulrich painted a young apprentice drinking during a moment’s pause in his work in The Village Printing Shop, Haarlem (1884).

Christian Ludwig Bokelmann’s oil sketch of a Lead Mine in Selbeck (1888) has a more subtle social message for an ancient industry that had long recognised the toxicity of the lead it worked with, but continued to employ children.

The Naturalist artist Jean-Eugène Buland tackled more complex issues in his Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson (1888). After France’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, efforts were made to make France more industrial and more modern. Here a young boy is being trained by the foreman to make a cogwheel, when many would have preferred him still to be at school.

Painting men and women at work was by no means confined to Naturalists, with their attention to fine detail. Alessandro Milesi’s undated The Spinners is a much looser oil sketch that could qualify as being an Impression. This shows one of the lighter industries that employed predominantly women.

Maximilien Luce painted many works showing people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium.

With the decline of Naturalism in the early twentieth century, the emphasis on workers weakened, and artists like Hans Baluschek returned to painting heavy plant and processes in his Steel Rolling Mill (1910).

Finally, Robert Sterl’s Ironworkers of 1919 is an oil sketch showing workers at one of the Krupp plants in Germany. Their only protective clothing is a heavy leather apron.

For those used to agricultural work, factories were relentlessly demanding. Workloads didn’t change with season, and each year passed without the celebration of harvest home. Few employers had easier work available that might offer those recovering from illness or injury a little respite, and as age took its toll on their bodies the only alternative was unemployment.

For those who had arrived from the country, towns and cities were alien places. This article shows a selection of paintings of the ordinary parts where the common people lived and worked.

The city of Paris was substantially redeveloped by Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the middle of the nineteenth century, but his wide boulevards only displaced common people into cramped slums in other areas. Montmartre, for instance, wasn’t incorporated into the city until 1860, and in 1871 was the source of the uprising that became the Paris Commune.

Pierre Bonnard’s Rue Tholozé or Montmartre in the Rain (1897) shows one of the streets at the heart of Montmartre, not far from the famous Sacré-Coeur. Seen from the third or fourth floor, it’s a grey and wet evening in which the lights of the windows provide a pervasive warm glow.

Bonnard’s Narrow Street in Paris (c 1897) is an aerial view of a bustling backstreet.

George Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side of New York City. Washing was hung out to dry on ropes strung between their wooden balconies.

Colin Campbell Cooper’s Columbus Circle from 1909 shows the interaction of jumbled buildings, light, smoke, and steam. With Gaetano Russo’s landmark statue of Christopher Columbus just to the right of centre, the circle had only been completed in 1905, as part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, off to the right. In the foreground, Cooper shows some of the more intimate sights of this new elevated world, with a woman hanging out her washing amid the chimneys.

Many cities grew around heavy industries, such as Charleroi in the Black Country of Belgium.

Maximilien Luce’s Slag-Heaps of Sacré Madame from 1897 is perhaps a unique view of this city. Slag heaps or spoil tips were an inevitable sight in coal-mining country. They’re formed from the spoil or waste removed from underground, and don’t contain slag, the by-products of metal smelting. Mining spoil is frequently toxic, and can result in disastrous landslides.

Few cities enjoyed the cleaner air that most do today. In London, in particular, ‘smogs’ composed of a toxic mixture of smoke and fog caused the deaths of many thousands each winter. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that any effort was made to reduce smoke emissions from industry and domestic heating.

Frits Thaulow’s The Smoke from 1898 shows a suburb overwhelmed by smoke, with houses crammed up against factory walls. Few cities enforced any separation between industrial areas and housing, and there were no restrictions on the discharge of smoke even in densely populated zones.

Alfred Roll’s undated sketch of A Large Town of Smoke probably dates from the same period.

Whereas the French Impressionists gave small glimpses of smoke billowing from the chimneys of factories sprawling out around Paris, Maximilien Luce painted Industrial City in 1899, again probably around Charleroi.

The largest employer in the German city of Dortmund was its steelworks, founded in 1871. In 1905, Eugen Bracht painted this Impressionist view of the Hoesch Steelworks from the North, with its tall chimneys and their plumes of acrid smoke.

Two years later, Bracht returned to paint the Hoesch Iron and Steel Plant, Dortmund (1907).

Constantin Meunier painted in the Borinage, another mining area to the west of Charleroi in Belgium. His undated Black Country – Borinage shows the area where Vincent van Gogh lived between 1878-80, then one of the major coal mining areas in Europe. The tower at the left is the pit head, where trucks of freshly cut coal were brought to the surface.

Meunier’s Coron, Women having a Chat gives insight into the close communities in these areas, and shows the main drain running down the middle of the street. Coron refers to the local housing of the working class in northern France and Belgium, the equivalent of Britain’s back-to-back miners’ cottages.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. Construction work in the French capital continued to be active well into the early twentieth century, and Luce painted its many facets. The factories on the opposite bank have infiltrated surrounding residential and commercial districts, only to fill the air with plumes of smoke.