The nineteenth century brought huge changes in technology and society. Some, like telegraphy, telephones and radio, haven’t featured in many paintings, and even the bicycle has largely escaped the canvas. But the advent of railways, and later motor cars, had greater impact on visual art. In this weekend’s two articles, I trace the first century of railways in paintings from the early 1840s.

JMW Turner was among the first painters to capture this in his Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway in 1844. This pioneering railway connected London with rich farming country across the south of England, down into western counties, eventually reaching Cornwall in 1859, fifteen years after Turner completed this painting, and eight years after his death.

William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) captures the atmosphere of a major railway station in a capital city, here Paddington Station in London, by coincidence Brunel’s terminus for his Great Western Railway. Stations like this became a focus of activity, emotional partings and arrivals, migration, and a fair bit of crime too, everything the narrative painter might wish for.

Britain may have been the first to build railways, but the mania spread like wildfire across Europe and North America.

As the railroad, it started to cover the far greater distances of the USA and Canada. William Hahn’s Southern Pacific R.R. Station at Sacramento (c 1873-4) shows its rapid growth there.

Smoke, steam and other atmospheric effects brought inspiration to the French artists who were developing painting from where Turner’s death had left it.

France had been an early innovator and adopter, although such post-classical motifs wouldn’t have been appropriate for the Salon, of course. It took Édouard Manet painting his favourite model Victorine Meurent, in Le chemin de fer (The Railway) (1873), to break the ice. Its background is the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris. This painting was completed and sold in 1873 to the singer and avid collector Jean-Baptiste Faure, and astonishingly was the only painting accepted of three submitted to the Salon by Manet the following year, where it provoked outrage and ridicule, and a torrent of sarcastic cartoons in the press.

Near Manet’s painting in the Salon, a couple of works by Giuseppe De Nittis were given a warmer reception. Yet sometime between 1869 and 1880, De Nittis painted The Passing of a Train, his unashamed comment on the coming of the train.

As De Nittis, Monet, Pissarro, and the other Impressionists started painting in even more unacceptable styles around Paris, trains and railways came to appear even more.

Claude Monet’s The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1873) is one of his several landscapes centred on the railway from the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian War. At this time, Monet was a regular commuter by train: when he, Camille and his son moved out to Argenteuil at the end of 1871, he travelled the short distance into Paris by train.

Monet liked this bridge so much that he painted it again the following year, in The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1874).

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, steam power had become so essential to modern life it was assimilated into the everyday. Paul Cézanne’s family estate in Aix-en-Provence was connected by rail to Paris by 1856, and express trains to the Mediterranean coast enabled many artists whose studios were in the capital to paint in the remarkable light of the Midi. The prominent light ochre structure sweeping across many of Cézanne’s views of Mont Saint-Victoire is the long viaduct built to accommodate the railway that transported artists between Paris and the coast of the Midi.

In 1877, Claude Monet became the most painterly railway buff of them all. By then, he was becoming detached from Argenteuil, and sought a new radically modern urban theme. Where more appropriate than the steaming hubbub of the Gare Saint Lazare? Caillebotte paid the rent for him on a small studio nearby, and Monet gained approval to paint in the station. By the third Impressionist Exhibition of April 1877, Monet had assembled seven views of the station, including one that even seemed to please the critics. Among the paintings from that campaign is his Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877).

Monet was too smitten to stop in the station, though. In his Train Tracks at the Saint-Lazare Station (1877) he reversed the view and started showing railway signalling.

He went even further in his Saint-Lazare Station, the Western Region Goods Sheds (1877), showing the working parts with the smoky city beyond.

Long before cities gained their bright lights they had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. Persistent drunkenness has been recognised as a problem since ancient times, but it wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that its consequences on health were reported. Of course, alcohol abuse also took place in the country, but it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

In French cities like Paris the main culprit was seen as absinthe, produced from species of wormwood plants, and claimed to contain addictive and destructive drugs in addition to its high alcohol content. It was developed in the late eighteenth century, and popularised the following century, particularly among artists and writers.

Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 laments the fate of those who ended up drinking it. Pale green to yellow in colour, it was normally diluted with water, turning it cloudy, as seen is this woman’s glass.

Absinthe wasn’t the only route to alcoholism, though, as shown in Édouard Manet’s Drinker of Bocks from about 1878-79. Bock is a strong and dark lager originally brewed in Germany, and was often viewed as the start of the descent to absinthe and oblivion. Its equivalent in England was barley wine, with its similarly high alcohol content.

In The Absinthe Drinkers (c 1880-81) Jean-François Raffaëlli followed from Degas, here with two down-at-heel men sat outside a bar.

The Drinkers, or Monday’s Work (1884) is one of Émile Friant’s first social realist paintings, showing two unemployed and unskilled men sat drinking together against an exterior wall. The hands of the more distant man are conspicuously grubby and unkempt, and a small dog looks on accusingly.

Jean Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives a glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. The man looks rough, and is unshaven, although the woman is elegantly dressed, and apparently engaged in writing a letter. His battered old brown bowler hat suggests a working past before he succumbed to absinthe.

Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. As a bonus, at the top edge he lines up a parade of bottles containing alternatives.

As with Edvard Munch and so many other artists, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was prone to bouts of heavy drinking. In The Drinker’s Family from 1916, perhaps painted during a period of remorse over his behaviour, the artist here includes two self-portraits, as the young man at the right, and the wrecked alcoholic at the left.

The Morning After (1916) is another self-portrait of Johannessen as a drunkard, his arm around a woman who pokes her tongue out in disapproval of his addiction.

The culmination of this descent is shown in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888, where a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies have arrived at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.