Although few of those who migrated to the towns and cities from the countryside prospered as a result, there were sufficient examples to lure others to take their chances. For a young woman, success could come through the growing world of fashion.

The foot of the ladder was the greatest challenge: how to make the break from the worn-out worker shown in Christian Krohg’s Tired from 1885. This young seamstress was one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. A few of them had the good fortune to be discovered and taken up into a small dressmaker’s.

They might then enter the world of Moritz Stifter’s New Dress from 1889. Every face is smiling here, some perhaps a little vacuously, as an affluent young woman tries on a new dress, with its incredibly small waist. Although this room is full of fabric and the trappings of dressmaking, including the mandatory sewing machine, no one actually appears to be making anything.

A few specialised in making hats, as shown in Edgar Degas’ The Millinery Shop (1879/86). While husbands and partners were expected to pay for a woman’s hats, their choice was hers, and hers alone.

Jean Béraud’s fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées is enjoying her success, and carrying her work in two large hatboxes. She has also attracted the attention of the well-dressed man in a top hat behind and to the left of her.

Les Modistes (Two Milliners in the Rue du Caire, Paris) from 1885-86 is one of Paul Signac’s transitional paintings to Seurat’s Divisionism. These two young milliners are busy making fashionable hats and making their way into bourgeois life.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot’s At the Milliner (1901) shows the milliner in a mirror at the right.

Millinery was one of the staples of fashion houses like that of Paquin, whose success was characteristic of the late nineteenth century, and shown in Henri Gervex’s Five Hours at Paquin’s from 1906.

The purpose of these expensive hand-made hats was for show, when the lady was seen in appropriate surroundings. Jeanniot’s painting of the patrons of one of the most fashionable hotels in Paris shows all the hats out on parade in the inner garden of the Paris Ritz in fine weather.

Béraud’s Workers leaving the Maison Paquin (1907) shows the ladies who worked in Jeanne Paquin’s highly successful fashion house in the Rue de la Paix, as they left work at the end of the day.

A select few were fortunate enough to marry into the middle class and forge a more secure future for themselves.

Béraud’s After the Service at the Church of Sainte-Trinité (the ‘American Cathedral’) (c 1900) shows affluent Franco-American society at the turn of the century, and the prominence of hats and clothes.

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.

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.

Women in towns and cities were widely engaged in light factory work, commonly that involving the production of fabrics and garments such as spinning, weaving and assembly. Large numbers were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, the subject of this article.

Concentration of people in urban areas transformed what had been a small-scale household function into a sizeable service industry that was eventually industrialised by companies who have concentrated on the hotel trade. Individual washerwomen who might have been servants in households collected, laundered and finished clothing and linen that were then returned to the customer.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris, with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge. The bridge shown here connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town, probably one of the suburbs of Paris. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of works showing laundresses. Woman Ironing (c 1869) shows one of the army of women engaged or enslaved in this occupation in Paris at the time. She is young yet stands like an automaton, staring emotionlessly at the viewer. Her right hand moves an iron (not one of today’s convenient electrically-heated models) over an expanse of white linen in front of her. Her left arm hangs limply at her side, and her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. She is surrounded by pieces of her work.

Degas’ less gloomy painting of a Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) maintains the impression of this being protracted, backbreaking work, only slightly relieved by the colourful garments hanging around the laundress.

Washing, drying and ironing clothes was long and arduous, paying but a pittance. At the end of the day came exhaustion.

Fernand Pelez’s early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress from about 1880 is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Christian Krohg’s view, young women came to the city to work as seamstresses, who later ended up as prostitutes. The young woman seen in his Tired from 1885 is one of many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work. Krohg and others claimed that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient and drove women to seek alternatives. Prostitution was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

Eva Bonnier’s Dressmakers (1887) features two women dressed in plain working clothes, who are collaborating on the making of a dress for a special occasion.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

It took two world wars in the following century to start changing the division of labour between men and women.

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.

Many of those who came to live and work in urban areas were refugees from the numerous wars and unrest that had spread across the mainland of Europe. Their livestock and crops had been stolen or destroyed as armies or uprisings passed through the country, leaving them the task of rebuilding and restoring their food supplies.

As many of those living in the towns and cities of north-east France discovered during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, they were no better off, and the riots of the Paris Commune that followed brought further problems.

Although only a boy at the time, Maximilien Luce must have retained vivid memories of the Commune, which he finally committed to paint in his A Street in Paris in May 1871 (also known as The Commune) in 1903-6.

With the rise of cities and industrialisation, the urban poor were in even greater distress than those in the country, while those who owned factories and businesses became obscenely rich at their expense. Social inequality drove movements aimed at ending such injustice, including those to improve the rights of workers. Strikes broke out in many of the poorest areas, such as the coalfields in the north-east of France and nearby Belgium.

One of the first prominent paintings of a strike is Alfred Philippe Roll’s Miners’ Strike, exhibited in the Salon of 1880 or perhaps the following year. It’s most probably based on a strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield of that year. It shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Most of those present are barefoot. Mounted soldiers or police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Roll agreed to sell his painting to the state at cost price, on the understanding that it would be hung in the Ministry of Commerce, but he was tricked and it was sent instead to the local museum in Valenciennes, where it would bring less embarrassment. It has since become badly damaged, and is now only known from this reproduction, printed in Le Petit Journal of 1 October 1892.

This painting may well have influenced Émile Zola when he was preparing to write his novel Germinal, about a miners’ strike in the same coalfield as that painted by Roll. This painting and Zola’s novel also appear to have inspired a series of Naturalist works showing other strikes across Europe.

Robert Koehler’s masterpiece of The Strike in the Region of Charleroi was made in 1886, when there was a succession of strikes across Belgium. These started in Liège as a commemoration of the fifteen anniversary of the Paris Commune, but spread through industrialised zones to the region around Charleroi and Hainault.

Koehler shows a group of workers standing outside the smart entrance to offices (detail below). The top-hatted owner stands on the top step, one of his managers looking anxious beside him. The leader of the workers is at the foot of the steps telling the industrialist of the workers’ demands. Wives in the crowd are remonstrating with their husbands, one demonstrator is picking up a rock to use as a projectile, and at the far left is a young wife with her two children, looking anxiously at the proceedings. The situation is looking increasingly nasty, although there are no signs yet of police or troops, or of violent confrontation.

The strikes of 1886 led to the formation of a parliamentary socialist party in Belgium, and increasing industrial strife. This came to a head in 1893, when there was a general strike called by the Belgian Labour Party in a demand for universal male suffrage. It has been claimed that this was the first such general strike in Europe.

The general strike was called to start on the evening of 11 April, and is depicted in Eugène Laermans’ An Evening’s Strike, or The Red Flag (1893). Instead of Koehler’s small group of workers, the whole population, men, women and children, are on the march, and distant factories have fallen silent.

The Belgian government tried to quell growing clashes between strikers and troops, which by the 17 April led to The Riots of Mons shown here in an anonymous illustration published in Le Petit Journal the following month. The artist here concentrates attention on the civilian casualties. Between 13 and 20 civilians were apparently killed, here by the Civil Guard shown in the right background. The following day the government acceded to the demands, and the strike came to an end.

Strikes were prominent in other European countries at the time, including regions of Spain. In the Spring of 1892, workers in Valladolid, in north-western Spain, came out on strike.

José Uría y Uría’s painting After a Strike from 1895 is different from those above, in showing the inside of one of the factories. In the foreground, a worker lies apparently dead, his wife and young daughter grieving beside his body. Next to him is a large forge hammer, presumably the cause of his death. In the distance on the left are two policemen or civil guards, one of whom is comforting an older daughter. An opening in the factory wall at the right edge shows mounted forces outside. The likely reading is that the worker shown was killed during the violence of the strike, which has now been suppressed by troops.

Ramon Casas i Carbó’s The Charge, or Barcelona 1902 was dated by him in 1903, and refers to a strike that took place in Barcelona in the previous year. It shows a rider of the Civil Guard trying to avoid running over a member of the crowd, during a violent confrontation.

Another fine anonymous illustration from Le Petit Journal of 1 April 1906 shows continuing unrest in the French coalfields, here in The Miners’ Strike in Pas-de-Calais. Attention is drawn to the increasing strength and politicisation of strikers and their families, as they stride forward under numerous red banners, and the growing socialist movement across Europe.

One of the most disturbing paintings of strikes during this period is Stanisław Lentz’s Strike (1910). He shows three workers, who are presumably all involved in a strike at the time. At the left is an older man who is singing or chanting his commitment to the workers’ movements; in the centre is a younger worker, his arms folded in his determination not to be moved; at the right is an angry man who looks ready to fight for his rights, his right hand already clenched into a fist and ready to punch.

The early industrial revolution in Europe used existing forms of power, wind and water, but quickly outgrew their capacity and turned to coal to fuel its growth. The heat generated by burning coal turned water into steam, and steam powered engines to run industrial processes and to move goods, including coal from the mines.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coal mining grew greatly in the coalfields that had been discovered across northern Europe. Although some was quarried from open-cast sites, most production came from deep mines. Northern France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Britain had an insatiable need for hard-working, fit young men to work as miners in the towns and cities that developed in mining areas. In Britain alone, annual production of coal grew from 3 to 16 million tons between 1700 and 1815, and doubled again by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Constantin Meunier is best known for his gritty paintings of coal mining and foundries in Belgium in the late nineteenth century. He started painting these motifs in 1880, when he was commissioned to paint industrial parts of the country, and continued until his death in 1905. Unfortunately almost all of these paintings are undated.

The similarities between Meunier’s Mining Area (above) and Black Country – Borinage (below) suggest that they are the same view, and that above may have been his original plein air sketch. The Borinage was one of the major coal mining areas in Europe at the time, and is in the Belgian province of Hainault. It was here that Vincent van Gogh lived between 1878-80. The tower at the left is the pit head, where trucks of freshly cut coal were brought to the surface.

Meunier’s painting of Miner at the Exit of the Shaft shows several miners enjoying a few moments to smoke and relax at the pit head. Three are carrying safety lamps, used to minimise the risk of underground explosions even though they had flames inside them. These were developed in about 1815, after a long succession of mine disasters caused by explosions, and weren’t replaced by electric lamps until after 1900.

In his Return from the Mine, two male miners stride back to their cottages after completing their shift underground. With them is a young woman, employed to perform supporting tasks, who is walking barefoot and holding up her wooden clogs.

Painted in 1887, The Carriage Driver shows another working woman, taking a short break from her duties. She appears to be sat by the pit head, and has a safety lamp by her left leg, making it likely that she too is in one of the mining areas.

One task largely performed by women was the movement of wagons containing coal or spoil (general rock debris). These two young women, termed Les Hiercheuses, did just that, and were painted by Meunier in about 1885-90.

Meunier also made monumental reliefs and sculptures to commemorate the miners, and this Triptych of the Mine, showing their Descent, Calvary, and Ascent, to parallel the Crucifixion.

Until its mechanisation in the twentieth century, coal mining was almost entirely manual. It also had one of the highest risks of death or injury at work. Those who survived the immediate physical dangers rarely lived long, as a result of destructive lung disease (pneumoconiosis) from inhaling dust when working underground.

As urban areas grew and were remodelled during the nineteenth century, demand for construction workers increased. Many of those who were drawn from the country found employment as labourers, and some were able to undertake more skilled jobs as carpenters. Several painters of the period showed insights into the working conditions in this industry, including George Hendrik Breitner who painted views of Amsterdam during its expansion late that century.

Breitner captured this in his undated watercolour sketch of Ground Porters with Carts. These were the jobs that immigrants from the country were often employed in, as physically demanding and dirty as their previous work on the land.

Building Site in Amsterdam is another of Breitner’s sketches of construction work, this time painted in oils.

In Paris, it was Maximilien Luce who painted some of the best insights into the rebuilding of parts of the city in the early years of the twentieth century.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Maximilien Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. These labourers are pulling on the rope to drive piles into the foundation of buildings on the banks of the River Seine. Although piles could also be driven by steam power, it was often cheaper and quicker to use labourers instead.

Luce’s Construction Site from 1911 shows the intense human involvement in the urban cycle of demolition and rebuilding.

This period also brought some vast works of civil engineering, such as the construction of the ship canal between Liverpool and Manchester in England.

The Excavation of the Manchester Ship Canal: Eastham Cutting with Mount Manisty in the distance (1891) is one of a series Benjamin Williams Leader painted showing the fruits of his brother’s engineering labours. This major canal was constructed between 1887 and 1893, and carries ocean-going ships from the estuary of the River Mersey near Liverpool 36 miles (58 km) into the heart of Manchester, in the industrial north of England. This view is set close to the seaward entrance, and shows steam diggers and railways being used to excavate and remove the spoil, some of which is building Mount Manisty to the left of centre. The canal remains in use, and is currently being further improved.

Many of those working in these industries increasingly felt exploited in the late nineteenth century, leading to social unrest and strikes, as I’ll show in the next article in this series.

If country folk were to be drawn into towns and cities, those urban areas had to provide paid work. During the early decades of the industrial revolution those jobs were often in mills and factories near the source of their raw materials or power. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract the coal, and again where iron ore was readily available. As canals and railways enabled supplies to be moved further and faster, towns and cities flourished as centres of manufacturing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, large scale iron production had already started in North America. In 1857, investors opened a site for the production of iron primarily for the growing railways across Canada, and a few years later William Armstrong painted those Toronto Rolling Mills (1864). By this time, it was the largest iron mill in Canada, and the largest manufacturing industry in the city, but it was soon surpassed by steel mills and shut down in 1873.

John Ferguson Weir took his dark realism before an unusual motif for American painting at that time, the hot, harsh, and dangerous world of the West Point Iron and Cannon Factory, in The Gun Foundry (1866). The moment shown here is the casting of a Parrott Gun, in the foundry responsible for making most of the large guns used by the Union forces during the Civil War. This was located to the north of New York City, where there was a rich supply of timber, local iron ore, and water power.

Weir’s Forging the Shaft is a replica painted in 1874-7, after the original of 1868 was destroyed by fire. It shows the same foundry, this time working the massive propellor shaft for an ocean liner, more a symbol of peace and trade than past conflict.

Adolph von Menzel’s The Iron Rolling Mill from 1875 gives a good impression of the crowded, sweaty, and dangerous environment in which iron and steel workers spent, and sometimes lost, their lives.

Production of steel on an industrial scale started after 1857, with the introduction of the Bessemer Process. Constantin Meunier’s undated Steel Foundry must therefore have been painted during the 1860s or later.

The dangers of iron and steel work are obvious today, and claimed many casualties at the time. Few employers had any concern for the safety of those who worked in these conditions, as there was a steady supply of young and able men to keep production rolling and profits accruing.

Not all industries were heavy, hot or sweaty. Charles Frederic Ulrich painted a young apprentice drinking during a moment’s pause in his work in The Village Printing Shop, Haarlem (1884).

Christian Ludwig Bokelmann’s oil sketch of a Lead Mine in Selbeck (1888) has a more subtle social message for an ancient industry that had long recognised the toxicity of the lead it worked with, but continued to employ children.

The Naturalist artist Jean-Eugène Buland tackled more complex issues in his Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson (1888). After France’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, efforts were made to make France more industrial and more modern. Here a young boy is being trained by the foreman to make a cogwheel, when many would have preferred him still to be at school.

Painting men and women at work was by no means confined to Naturalists, with their attention to fine detail. Alessandro Milesi’s undated The Spinners is a much looser oil sketch that could qualify as being an Impression. This shows one of the lighter industries that employed predominantly women.

Maximilien Luce painted many works showing people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium.

With the decline of Naturalism in the early twentieth century, the emphasis on workers weakened, and artists like Hans Baluschek returned to painting heavy plant and processes in his Steel Rolling Mill (1910).

Finally, Robert Sterl’s Ironworkers of 1919 is an oil sketch showing workers at one of the Krupp plants in Germany. Their only protective clothing is a heavy leather apron.

For those used to agricultural work, factories were relentlessly demanding. Workloads didn’t change with season, and each year passed without the celebration of harvest home. Few employers had easier work available that might offer those recovering from illness or injury a little respite, and as age took its toll on their bodies the only alternative was unemployment.

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.