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.

In the first of this weekend’s two articles, I showed how the Valèncian artist Joaquín Sorolla painted the arduous lives of fishermen working from local beaches, during the 1890s. Although he had been taught by Ignacio Pinazo, who had probably depicted Malvarrosa Beach for the first time in 1887, Sorolla doesn’t appear to have started to paint such scenes for a few years into the twentieth century.

His large Afternoon Sun, Beaching the Boat (1903) is another scene of fishermen working hard with three teams of oxen to bring a fishing boat ashore, in the spirit of Return from Fishing, and there’s still not a well-dressed young lady in sight.

In 1905, he travelled south from València to paint another view of the rocky coast there, at Isla del Cap Marti, Jávea.

The White Boat, Jávea, with its skilful use of broken reflections and underwater views, came from the same summer campaign.

Then by 1908, fishermen and the hindquarters of oxen were replaced by After the Bath, again on the beach at València.

His Beach of València by Morning Light, again from 1908, shows mothers taking their children into the water on El Cabañal beach, València, with his favourite fishing boats in the background.

In 1909, he painted another of what had now become his signature works on the beach at València, Strolling Along the Seashore. Although novel to Sorolla, he may have been influenced by prior art, for example in the painting below from one of the Danish Impressionists who had gathered at Skagen in Denmark.

Just as French Impressionism was born on the beaches of northern France, so the movement spread around the world on its sand coasts, under the warm light of the sun. Danish Impressionists like Peder Severin Krøyer gathered to enjoy a Summer Evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach from 1893, one of a series of similar views painted by Krøyer on this remote strand at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland), the northernmost part of Denmark.

Others had travelled south to the Midi to do the same. Théo van Rysselberghe’s Divisionist La Promenade (1901) captures the rich light of one of the beaches in the south of France.

Beach paintings had come of age at last.

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.

Sewing pieces of textile or other sheet materials dates back to the Stone Age if not before, and needles fashioned from bone are among man’s oldest tools. Until the nineteenth century, all forms of sewing were performed using the hands. Since then machines have gradually become available, and were popularised in the twentieth century, although a great deal of sewing is still done by hand. Across much of Europe and the Western world, sewing has traditionally been one of the key skills of women, although it has also been a professional task for men from sailors to surgeons. This article looks at those whose sewing goes beyond simply joining fabrics using thread, and tomorrow’s looks more broadly at sewing as an activity.

Although weaving has played an important role in several classical myths, sewing wasn’t as prominent. Even in Christian religious painting, it has only become a feature in more recent times.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early pre-Raphaelite painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9), the young Mary is embroidering with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine, by that time a thoroughly socially-acceptable activity for a gentleman. Rosetti uses Mary’s embroidery to introduce the symbolic colour red, signifying the Passion to come, and this slow, painstaking activity as a symbol of the demands of motherhood.

The most common narrative role of sewing in paintings is that of a woman supporting a cause or a person.

The patriot leader Giuseppe Garibaldi adopted the red shirt as an improvised uniform for his supporters, particularly the Garibaldini, who followed him in the Expedition of the Thousand of 1860, that led to unification of Italy. Odoardo Borrani’s Sewing Red Shirts for Volunteers (1863) shows four middle-class lady supporters eagerly doing their bit for Garibaldi’s cause.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s Stitching the Standard from 1911, a young princess sits in a cutout at the top of a castle wall, sewing the black and gold flag to be flown from the castle. She comes straight from Arthurian legend, or a fairy tale, perhaps.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale shows Elaine of Astolat in her illustration for the 1913 edition of Tennyson’s account of this story in his Idylls of the King. She sits sewing in the family castle, guarding Sir Lancelot’s shield.

Mothers, wives and daughters of fishermen provided their shoreside support, as shown by Anna Ancher in this Fisherman’s Wife Sewing from 1890.

Joaquín Sorolla’s Sewing the Sail from 1896 shows a scene on a patio at Valencia’s El Cabañal beach, during the Sorolla family holiday in the summer of that year. Although it may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch. It shows the whole family engaged in one of the more technically challenging supporting tasks ashore.

Just as fishermen’s wives weren’t allowed to go to sea, other women sewing in supporting roles were also left behind. In the case of Wenzel Tornøe’s Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning of 1882, that may not have been intentional. This seamstress had been engaged in making costumes to be worn for the Danish festivities of Pentecost (Whitsun), when many Danes rise early to go out and see the sun dance at dawn. By the time the festival morning has arrived, she has fallen asleep over her work, exhausted, with an oil lamp still lit beside her.

Harriet Backer’s Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.