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.

By 1880, just two years after he had completed his training under Carolus-Duran in Paris, John Singer Sargent was in the ascendant. His skills were in growing demand for the portraits of the rich and famous, and he also took time to travel and paint abroad, mainly in Spain and Italy.

When he was in Spain in around 1880-81, he painted this Spanish Dancer.

During a visit to Italy in the period 1880-82, he painted these Venetian Glass Workers.

In early 1883, Sargent made overtures to one of the best-known young socialites in Paris, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a French creole immigrant from New Orleans, who had married the French banker Pierre Gautreau. Her beauty was the talk of the town, and numerous artists had asked to paint her portrait as a means of promoting their own careers. The first request that she accepted was Sargent’s, in February 1883. She proved a reluctant sitter, and it wasn’t until June of the following year that Sargent was able to pin her down in her estate in Brittany to start preparatory studies. He didn’t complete the finished work until well into the autumn.

We can’t see his original version of Madame X, as its reception drove him to make alterations to tone down its overt eroticism. Her pose was considered sexually suggestive, and one strap of her gown had fallen down her shoulder adding to the image’s sexuality. It caused a scandal when exhibited at the Salon, and was lampooned mercilessly in the press.

Sargent sought temporary solace flirting with the fashion for Impressionism.

He had first met Claude Monet in 1876, but it’s thought that this painting of Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood was made in 1885, when they were painting together at Monet’s house in Giverny. At the right is Alice, Monet’s wife.

That year Sargent decided to move his portraiture studio away from the scandal in Paris, to London.

By 1886, Sargent had fully settled into his London studio, and the following year had established his reputation, which was reinforced when he exhibited Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose at the Royal Academy. This was bought immediately by the Tate Gallery. From then until he closed his studio in 1907, he was the leading portrait painter in London. In spite of his obvious success, he was among those who were unhappy with the Royal Academy, and was a founding member of the New English Art Club in 1886.

His uncommissioned work often took him plein air and with progressively loosening style. He visited France frequently, attended Impressionist exhibitions, and developed his friendship with Monet. His informal works were often loose bravura gatherings of marks that appear to have been painted very quickly indeed.

This is shown well in Sargent’s virtuoso Gust of Wind from about 1886-7, which compares with Claude Monet’s La Promenade from 1875.

By the end of the 1880s, his critics in England considered him an Impressionist, but Monet thought he was still under too much influence from Carolus-Duran to be considered Impressionist. His portrait business prospered: in 1887-8 he toured the US and gained over twenty important commissions, including that of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a major patron of the arts in Boston, where twenty-two of his paintings were shown in his first solo exhibition.

Sargent met Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) in November 1887, during that visit to the USA, when Bunker was a rising star of American Impressionism. Like Sargent, Bunker had trained in Paris, and the two became good friends. Bunker stayed with Sargent in England in the summer of 1888, when Sargent painted him at work, in Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot. Bunker tragically died of meningitis just two years later, at the age of only 29.

Sargent painted this Morning Walk in 1888.

Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) first met Sargent when the former was a precocious student at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1876. Sargent was the first person to buy one of Helleu’s paintings, for which he paid the huge sum of a thousand francs. Helleu and his wife Alice remained close friends with Sargent, and the couple often appear in his paintings. When he painted them in An Out-of-Doors Study in about 1889, they had been married three years.

On the evening of 1 April 1890, when Sargent was back in New York, he, William Merritt Chase and the famous Spanish dancer Carmencita met in Chase’s Tenth Street studio; she danced for them, and they sketched. On this occasion, Sargent opted for a more static pose in his La Carmencita (1890), with her hands at her hips, driving her bust out and her chin high, in assertive pride.

Demand for Sargent’s portraiture skills remained high during the 1890s.

In 1895, two notable young residents of New York City married. He was Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1867-1944), a recent graduate of Harvard who studied architecture for three years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Sargent’s alma mater. He went on to co-found the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes, and was a pioneer in social housing. She was Edith Minturn (1867-1937), daughter of the shipping magnate Robert Bowne Minturn, Jr., and destined to become a philanthropist, socialite, and artistic muse.

A close friend decided that a good wedding gift would be a portrait of Mrs Stokes painted by the greatest of the age, John Singer Sargent. For various reasons this was delayed, but in 1897 the artist and the couple got together and Sargent started work. His original intention had been to paint Mrs Stokes wearing formal evening dress sitting next to an Empire table. However, he changed his mind and decided to paint her standing in informal walking attire next to a Great Dane. As he was reconceiving this in his mind, he turned to a portrait that had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Sargent’s patron Henry Marquand in 1889: that of James Stuart, by van Dyck.

Unfortunately, Sargent was unable to find a suitable dog. Mr Stokes then “offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture”, as he put it in his memoirs. The result puts Mrs Stokes in charge, as an example of ‘The New Woman,’ and her husband as a surrogate dog.

València in Spain is well known in art from the dozens of paintings of well-dressed young ladies on its beaches, made by Joaquín Sorolla during the early years of the twentieth century. This weekend I look at how his art evolved from his earlier works of social realism to reach the brightly lit beach.

Sorolla was born in València in 1863, and started learning to draw and paint at the age of nine. Among his teachers when he was studying in his home town was another Valèncian, Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench (1849-1916), who had developed a loose Impressionist style in 1874.

In 1887, shortly after Pinazo stopped teaching at the Academy, he painted one of the earliest depictions of Malvarrosa Beach, the most popular in València, a painting almost certainly seen by the young Sorolla.

Sorolla would also have seen and been influenced by the paintings of Francisco Pradilla (1848-1921) from Zaragoza, a history painter who had been Director of the Academy of Spain in Rome, and Enrique Simonet (1866-1927), another Valèncian.

Simonet must have painted his Málaga Beach at Dusk when he was back in Spain during a visit from his studies in Rome in 1889. It shows well his increasing attention to detail which was taking him away from his early Impressionist style.

By the 1890s, although working primarily in Madrid, Sorolla began to use the fishermen of València as a source of motifs. Early among those is this man Peeling Potatoes (1891) in one of the fishing boats hauled up just above the sea on the beach there. Relatively small and quite sketchy, this may have been a study he intended to develop into a larger more finished work.

Sorolla’s And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! from 1894 is set in the hold of one of the larger fishing vessels, amid spare tackle, a large barrel, and some of its catch. Two older men are attending to a youth, who appears to have been wounded, presumably as the result of an accident at sea. Around the boy’s neck is a pendant good-luck charm; he is stripped to the waist and pale, and one of the men is pressing a dressing against his abdomen. Lit from an open hatch at the top left, the painting has the immediacy of a photographic snapshot and looks documentary.

Sorolla’s title is incisive social comment about the values of a society that was happy to see young boys go to sea to fish, putting their lives at risk for those ashore to enjoy cheap seafood. This was painted during the summer of 1894, again in València, and went on to great acclaim in the Paris Salon the following year, where it was bought for the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

At the same time that he was painting that work, Sorolla was busy on his even larger Return from Fishing (1894), now one of the most visually impressive exhibits in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, following its purchase for the French state from the Salon of 1895, where it won a gold medal. Romantic though this may appear today, it’s a carefully detailed account of the complex, strenuous, dangerous and above all primitive working conditions of the local fishermen of València, who still used teams of oxen to haul their boats up the beach.

Valencian Fishermen (1895) is perhaps a little more relaxed, and a far smaller essay on the work of the fishermen as they maintain their gear at the water’s edge.

Although known primarily for his portraits and figurative works, Sorolla painted some fine landscapes, which may have had a more personal significance. The Cape of San Antonio, Jávea from 1896 shows this part of the southern end of the Gulf of Valencia, here from Cap Marti to the south.

Sorolla’s best-known painting from this Naturalist period is his large Sad Inheritance (1899), which won him the Grand Prix and medal of honour at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and a medal in Madrid the following year. As ever, its apparent spontaneity is deceptive: this is one of his most carefully prepared paintings.

It shows a group of young boys from a local charitable hospital enjoying a visit to the sea in the care of a lone priest, and celebrates the mission of the Hospitaller Order of St John of God, who had built the hospital in 1892 at the end of Malvarrosa Beach (Platja de la Malva-rosa). Sorolla later said that he had witnessed this scene one evening in a remote corner of the beach, and once he had been given permission to paint the boys, he made an initial oil sketch from memory.

Although Sad Inheritance was Sorolla’s last large Naturalist painting, he continued to create works in similar style. Lunch on the Boat, painted the previous year, shows a group of Valèncian men and boys eating an improvised lunch under the awning on their fishing boat.