Painting in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century was centred on Paris. A lot happened in other countries too – such as the Pre-Raphaelites – but the major movements of the time came together in the capital city of France. Yet in the middle of this, from 1870-71, there was a major war in northern France between two of the great empires of the day, France and Prussia. Paris was put under siege, fell to Prussian occupation, and was then torn apart by the Commune.

These events had great impact on art and artists at the time. Some fled for safe places: several went to London, where they were exposed to important influences such as the paintings of Turner and Constable, who were formative to the Impressionists. Some died during that war, and promising and influential careers were terminated abruptly. Many stayed, and witnessed the horrors of war at first hand.

This weekend I look at the Franco-Prussian War and its immediate aftermath, stopping short of the ensuing turmoil of the Paris Commune.

Like so many wars, the Franco-Prussian War arose because of the conflicting ambitions of countries. The French Second Empire under Napoleon III had been in decline for several years, and had already demanded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the left bank of the Rhine in ‘compensation’ for Prussia’s annexation of territories to form the North German Confederation. Prussia was clearly seeking to become the dominant power in Europe, by forming a single nation from those previously separate states, plus the Southern German States and the French territory of Alsace-Lorraine.

France and Prussia were on a collision course, and on 19 July 1870 France declared war on the North German Confederation, a war for which the French were almost completely unprepared.

Fleury Chenu’s father in Briançon, France, was a master tailor working for the French Sixth Regiment at the time. Chenu’s Trainees, Snow Effect from 1870 gives a good idea of the limited preparation which the French had made as tensions mounted during the previous winter. Although a detailed realist painting, Chenu’s sky is powerful, and sets the scene for the straggling trainees as they make their way along the icy road.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot had become an officer in the French infantry in 1866, and at the time of the war was a Lieutenant in the 23rd Infantry. He must have known how numerically inferior and weak the French forces were when he painted these Reservists (1870) queueing in the heavy showers to enlist and serve their country. This mobilisation occurred before reforms had been implemented to the system, and proved chaotic and inadequate.

Jeanniot was wounded at Rezonville, was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his service during the war, and eventually left the army in the rank of Major.

Emperor Napoleon III left Paris for the new headquarters in Metz, as commander of the Army of the Rhine, on 28 July 1870. Although the Prussian army had its own professional General Staff under the command of Field Marshal von Moltke, Adolph von Menzel here shows the ceremonial Departure to the Army of King William I, 31 July 1870 (1871). That same day, Napoleon’s forces moved towards the Saar River to pre-emptively seize the Prussian town of Saarbrücken.

Anton von Werner had been sent with the staff of the Prussian Third Corps under the command of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. When French and Prussian forces fought their first substantial action in the Battle of Wissembourg on 4 August, the French were soundly defeated and forced to retreat. The commander of the French I Corps was killed, and von Werner committed that to canvas in 1888 as Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm with the Body of General Abel Douay, Weißenburg, 4 August 1870.

That was the first of a series of major defeats for the French during August.

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville made his reputation with a succession of popular paintings showing the war. The Last Cartridges (1873) shows French snipers from the Blue division of the Marines ambushing Bavarian troops in l’Auberge Bourgerie in Bazeilles just prior to the Battle of Sedan, in which the French suffered their most disastrous defeat to date: on 2 September 1870, Napoleon III himself was forced to surrender with 104,000 of his soldiers.

De Neuville’s The Spy from 1880 shows a scene exploiting the humiliation of the French defeat. As Prussian forces advanced through northern France, they captured and shot good French citizens who they considered had got in their way. The Frenchman in blue to the right of centre is being searched and stripped in front of a group of Prussian officers, clearly accused of trying to defend his own country. Paintings like this fuelled Revanchism, the lasting sense of bitterness and demand for revenge against Prussia, and were disturbingly popular.

De Neuville’s In the Trenches (1874) is perhaps a more faithful depiction of the conditions that French soldiers had to endure as the Prussians took more French territory during the early winter. Members of the Garde Mobile take what shelter they can in the bitter cold.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows that life was no easier for the better-trained and properly equipped Prussian forces as the fighting moved into the winter. I’m very grateful to Boris for decoding the uniforms and equipment shown here (see his comment below). The soldier on the left is French, and holds a French Chassepot musketon with a long yataghan bayonet, while his colleague on the right appears to be Prussian, with his pickelhaube spiked helmet and a heavy cavalry cuirass that’s essentially modernised armour. Behind them is a group of mixed French and German soldiers who appear to be walking wound proceeding in front of an ambulance wagon.

Émile Betsellère’s moving L’Oublié! (Forgotten) from 1872 shows the appalling conditions facing the wounded after a winter battle.

Albert Anker was a Swiss artist who you wouldn’t have expected to have painted scenes from the Franco-Prussian War. However, in January 1871, he was witness to a strange event that must have affected him deeply.

The French General Charles Bourbaki (1816-1897) had been put in command of the Army of the East, soldiers who had been hastily trained and were ill-equipped. He and his troops were defeated in their attempt to raise the siege of Belfort, and were pursued by the Prussians until they crossed the border into Switzerland in late January and early February. Just over half of his 150,000 men had survived, and were in desperate straits by this time, as the winter conditions worsened. The Swiss disarmed them, gave them as much shelter and aid as they could, as shown in Anker’s painting of Bourbakis from 1871, and returned them to France in March.

Most important of all, though, was the fact that on 19 September 1870, Prussian forces had taken control of the country around Paris, and put the capital under siege.

Across much of the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, this is the wettest part of the year. It’s when puddles are everywhere, and what used to be firm ground turns into soft deep mud. Footpaths and bridleways become deep tracts of mud, impassable in anything but high boots. Yet look through paintings of winter and you’ll notice that few artists before 1800 have depicted people, vehicles or animals in mud of any significant depth. This weekend I look at some of the more faithful accounts of this ingloriously muddy time of year.

In the early nineteenth century, streets in major cities in Europe including Paris spent much of the winter as muddy morasses. Enterprising poorer inhabitants took long planks to locations where the more affluent would try to cross those rivers of mud, and hired them out to enable the rich to stay cleaner.

This is shown well in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, where a whole family is taking advantage of one of these crossings. This spared their footwear and clothing the otherwise inevitable coating of mud. As you can see, their shoes, lower legs and clothing are amazingly clean, as if they might actually have been painted in Boilly’s studio rather than the muddy streets of Paris.

As realism and real-world scenes became more popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, Adolph von Menzel showed a more accurate view of the problem of muddy roads in his Hussars Rescue a Polish Family from 1850. It had clearly been a wet autumn, with the leaves still burning red and gold on the trees in the background. These mounted soldiers are helping the elderly women from their carriage across the muddy ruts of the road. The hussar in the foreground, with his back to the viewer, even has mud on his riding boots.

One of the first artists to have used mud in a more meaningful way is Jean-Léon Gérôme, in his 1868 painting of The Death of Marshal Ney. Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.

Gérôme shows Ney’s body abandoned after the execution, slumped face down and lifeless in the mud, his top hat resting apart at the right edge of the canvas. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance. The mud only reinforces Gérôme’s powerful image of a cold, bleak, heartless execution.

Mud also has its recreational uses, as children of all eras will attest. Ludwig Knaus’s painting of Mud Pies from 1873 shows a group of children in the evening, near Dusseldorf, Germany, who are enjoying play in and with the mud, which is less fun for the swineherd behind them.

While other Impressionists had been exploring the effects of transient light on the River Thames, in 1875, Giuseppe De Nittis examined the city’s muddy and rutted streets, in his painting of The Victoria Embankment, London. This wasn’t one of the older roads in the city either: the Victoria Embankment wasn’t constructed until 1865, and had only opened to traffic five years before De Nittis painted it.

Muddy roads in northern British cities like Leeds were one of the favourite settings for the nocturnes of John Atkinson Grimshaw. At The Park Gate from 1878 (above) and November from 1879 (below) are glistening examples.

There’s an old English proverb “February fill dyke, be it black or be it white”, referring to the rain (black) or snow (white) that usually falls heavily during the month and fills all the ditches. Benjamin Williams Leader borrows that in his February Fill Dyke showing the waterlogged countryside near Worcester in 1881.

Mud became a favourite effect in the Naturalist paintings made so popular in France by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) shows a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud.

But for real mud, deep enough for wheels and legs to sink in and cake clothing, I turn to central and eastern Europe.

Jakub Schikaneder’s The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse towing a cart on which a coffin rests. The woman, presumably widowed before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. It’s late autumn in a world that is barren, bleak, muddy and forlorn.

Józef Marian Chełmoński’s undated Market is one of the most vivid insights into country life in Poland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To reach this street market, carts are being drawn through a deep ditch full of muddy water. Market stalls are mounted on tables set in the mud, which forms the basis for everything.

Also undated is contemporary and fellow Polish artist Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski’s Meeting the Train. A couple of horse-drawn carts have gone to a rural railway station to meet a train. The winter snow still covers much of the ground, except where it has been turned into rutted mud on the road.

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.