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.

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.

In this second article looking at examples of the use of posters in paintings, and how their contents can be relevant, I move on to the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century. By this time large-format colour printing was churning out unprecedented numbers of posters that were being stuck onto walls in public places. These promoted events and products, and the advertising industry was starting to flourish. Posters included in paintings had largely been associated with poverty.

In France, Naturalists like Jean-Eugène Buland took on challenging motifs with challenging readings. In Alms of a Beggar (1880), a young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin. Buland uses two small posters as decorations, one pinned to the white tablecloth at the left, the other attached to the wooden door at the right.

Those artists like Jean Béraud who were recording street scenes of Paris in the Belle Époque often featured posters.

Béraud’s view of A Windy Day on the Pont des Arts from 1880-1 contains several fascinating details, such as the man carrying his fishing rod among the stream of top-hatted gentlemen. Posters at the right advertise the Fête de Sèvres, held annually in that town each June, but this clearly isn’t a pleasant summer’s day.

Working from his customised studio carriage, Béraud developed a particular affection for the street kiosks that had sprung up on so many corners, and were covered with posters. Parisian Street Scene, claimed to date from about 1885, is one example, on the Boulevard des Italiens from the corner of the Rue Laffitte.

Béraud’s Carriages on the Boulevard des Italiens shows the same kiosk in the golden light of a winter’s afternoon. However, this view is purported to have been painted in 1890, five years after the Parisian Street Scene above. It isn’t credible that the posters illuminated in the kiosk have remained identical over that period.

Just as in London a few years before, posters continue to feature in the background of paintings of those living on the streets. Fernand Pelez’ Homeless from 1883 was exhibited at the Salon in Paris that year, where those viewing it only needed to walk round the corner from the Palais des Champs-Élysées (where it was held) to see scenes like this for real. Posters again refer ironically to festivals, and deliver information about traffic management in Paris.

Jean-François Raffaëlli’s Guests Waiting for the Wedding, from before 1884, are stood outside a wedding room that has, like them, seen better days. Behind them are official notices concerning dogs, an appeal for military reservists, and other local matters.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners from 1887 shows the arrival of outsiders in a close-knit community. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in black indicating recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. At the left edge are two posters apparently promoting local events, to which these foreigners presumably aren’t invited.

By the early twentieth century posters had grown into large hoardings shown in Paul Hoeniger’s view of Berlin’s Spittelmarkt from 1912. With the advent of motor vehicles came the visual excesses of the advertising industry that still wants to own everything we see today.

In the first of these two articles visiting the Tuileries Gardens in central Paris, I showed paintings known to have been made before the Communards burned the Tuileries Palace in 1871, and those up to Monet’s views of 1876. As a result of damage to the palace, it was demolished in 1883, leaving the space it had occupied to become an extension to the garden.

Today the Tuileries retains two substantial buildings: the Jeu de Paume and Musée de l’Orangerie, both at the Place de la Concorde end and almost surrounded by terraces. Its broad Grande Allée joins the massive Arc de Triomphe with its smaller sister, the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel, by the Louvre. Depending on the season, the gardens may be busy with runners, noisy with childrens’ amusements, or a well of relative calm amid the rumbling rush of Paris and its traffic.

Although Gaston de La Touche’s A Water Fountain in the Tuileries is undated, from its style it was painted after 1891, when he burned most of his earlier works and switched to this brighter style that could pass for Impressionism. Human figures are here, but dark, vague and subjugate to the jet of water in the fountain, the trees and the Louvre Palace behind. La Touche appears to have painted many fountains, and this may have been intended to form part of a series of such views.

Theodor von Hörmann’s undated In the Tuileries appears to be a brisk plein air sketch made in the late summer or early autumn. The child in the foreground is playing with a hoop.

The Tuileries Gardens, Paris (1895) may have been painted shortly before Maurice Brazil Prendergast left the city to return to Boston. While he was in Paris he met Édouard Vuillard, whose influence appears to have extended to his use of colour here, and Pierre Bonnard, an addicted sketcher of street scenes in Paris.

Childe Hassam’s Tuileries Gardens from about 1897 is an early work in Impressionist style, with visible facture and textbook linear perspective. Its gestural figures are skilfully executed, giving the viewer just sufficient detail to be able to distinguish different types of hats, for instance. This American Impressionist studied in Paris at the Académie Julian.

At the end of 1898, Camille Pissarro rented a flat for his family in Paris, from where he enjoyed a superb view over the Tuileries Gardens, which, unlike Monet and Renoir, he hadn’t painted until late in his career. His first series of eleven paintings was sold to Durand-Ruel in May for the sum of 27,000 Francs. The artist then returned to the same flat to paint a second series at the end of 1899.

These two versions of The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon (1899), above and below, are composed almost identically to Monet’s view from nearly 25 years earlier, with the dome of Les Invalides and the spires of the Church of Saint-Clotilde in the background. Pissarro was perhaps the first to capture the appearance of the gardens when busy, as they are during fine weather even in winter. His crowds of people are as varied and minimalist as those in his other series paintings of Paris.

Pissarro’s Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning from the same year is a similar aerial view, this time well into springtime, with the trees in full leaf, in their brilliant fresh green foliage. Although there are fewer people now, Pissarro affords us some delicate detail, for instance in the pram just above the middle of the lower edge of the canvas.

There are subtle differences between these three canvases demonstrating that Pissarro’s painting was far from mechanical, and involved significant interpretation. The spring view has a lower skyline that cannot be accounted for by its being angled more to the left than the winter views, for example. However details of trees and even quite small features in the distance match well, supporting the view that he did remain faithful to the real world.

Judging by the brown foliage in the trees in The Tuileries Garden (1905), Pierre Bonnard painted this view in the autumn. The rich array of statuary stands out well.

The Tuileries Gardens (1910) is one of Jean-François Raffaëlli’s colour engravings of the gardens, in a formal view. It’s easy to see how Degas’ enthusiasm for Raffaëlli’s work to be included in Impressionist exhibitions was so divisive. Although popular at the time, it wasn’t in the least Impressionist, and now seems perhaps a little anachronistic.

Finally, Pierre Thévenet’s The Tuileries Gardens in Autumn from 1922 is unique among these paintings in being completely unpopulated, and shows some of the trees during leaf-fall, with their rich colours, and the Louvre in the background. Thévenet was a Belgian Post-Impressionist who lived and worked in Paris from 1919, painting many views of the city.