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.

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.