Urban Revolutionaries: Introduction to paintings of life in growing cities

Over the last four months, I have posted a series of twenty articles about paintings showing rural life in Europe between 1500 and the 1920s. At the start of that period, countries across Europe were overwhelmingly rural, with about 80% of their people living in the countryside and engaged almost entirely in agricultural work. By the end of the nineteenth century that had reversed, with 80% living and working in cities and towns. This new series looks at where all those people went to live and work, the towns and cities, and what happened to them there.

Cities are of ancient origin. In its heyday, the city of Babylon had a population exceeding 200,000 and covered an area of about 3.5 square miles. Paris, the largest city in Europe in the early fourteenth century, had only just reached that size, and even now modern Paris has only ten times the population it had in 1328. By 1780, Paris had trebled in size, to a population of 650,000, and its accelerated growth during the nineteenth century saw it grow to 2.7 million in 1901.

Conventional wisdom holds that the size of cities is primarily limited by the population required to remain in the country to produce food for those in the city, and the city’s limited employment prospects. The first was changed dramatically by the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and the second by the ‘Industrial Revolution’. As we saw in the previous series, there wasn’t any discrete revolution in agriculture, but a prolonged series of improvements in yield. The Industrial Revolution started in rural areas, close to sources of its raw materials such as coal for energy and ores for the production of metal.

Cities were also vulnerable to depopulation, as the result of destruction in war, natural disasters, and epidemics including the Black Death and other outbreaks of plague, cholera and other infectious diseases that swept Europe from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century. They were also dependent on reliable supplies of food, and years with bad harvests could have significant impact on the growth of cities, even when they had a range of supply areas and good food security.

Nevertheless, with improvements in agriculture and the rise of manufacturing industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, towns and cities across Europe grew by attracting people from the country, and by their own increasing birth rate.

Jean Béraud (1849–1935), The Milliner on the Champs Elysées (year not known), oil on canvas, 45.1 × 34.9 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The lure of city life is well summarised in Jean Béraud’s fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées. This was all about the promise of material goods and wealth, fine clothes, and smart carriages, all the things that were lacking in rural life.

Artists like William Hogarth had been moralising about the dangers of this since the early eighteenth century, in visual stories such as his Harlot’s Progress.

Its general outline is of an innocent country girl, Moll Hackabout, who comes to London, and immediately falls into the hands of a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Moll becomes the kept mistress of a wealthy merchant, but later slides into common prostitution. She’s arrested, and ends up in London’s Bridewell Prison. Having earlier contracted syphilis, that disease progresses, steadily killing her. She finally dies at the age of 23, mourned only by her fellow prostitutes.

William Hogarth (1697–1764), A Harlot’s Progress: 1 Ensnared by a Procuress (engraving 1732 after painting c 1731), engraving, 30.8 x 38.1 cm, British Museum, London. Wikimedia Commons.

Moll Hackabout is first shown arriving at the Bell Inn, Cheapside, dressed in the fine bonnet and white dress of an innocent country girl. She’s seen being inspected by Elizabeth Needham, a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Hogarth gives the latter black skin lesions as a mark of longstanding syphilis, and her face is aged.

In the doorway at the right is an equally notorious rake, Colonel Francis Charteris, and his pimp John Gourlay, who are also taking an interest in the arrival of a fresh young innocent. In Moll’s luggage is a symbolic dead goose, suggesting her eventual death from gullibility. The address on the label attached to the dead goose reads “My lofing cosen in Tems Stret in London”, implying that Moll’s move to London has been arranged through intermediaries, who will have profited from her being trafficked into the hands of Elizabeth Needham.

Behind Moll, an itinerant preacher is engrossed in spreading the message to his small ad hoc congregation in the back of a covered wagon. In front of that a pile of pots is just about to collapse, as is Moll’s life.

Erik Henningsen (1855–1930), Farmers in the Capital (1887), oil, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

I’m sure those prospects weren’t in the minds of Erik Henningsen’s Farmers in the Capital (1887) when this country family first arrived in Copenhagen, complete with their large chest and farm dog. Around them city-dwellers are dressed fashionably, and stare at the outsiders with their rough clothing and filthy wooden clogs.

What these migrants found was different from the stories they had heard.

Frits Thaulow (1847–1906), The Smoke (1898), media and dimensions not known, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Frits Thaulow’s The Smoke from 1898 shows a suburb overwhelmed by the smoke, with houses crammed up against the factory walls. Few cities enforced any separation between industrial areas and housing, and there weren’t restrictions on the discharge of smoke even in densely populated zones. The water surface is also grimy and lacks the artist’s distinctive intricate reflections.

Children found their work very different from that in the country. Instead of looking after livestock and gleaning, they found themselves working long hours in demanding and often hazardous surroundings.

Joan Planella i Rodríguez (1849–1910), The Little Weaver (1882-89), oil on canvas, 67 x 55 cm, Museu d’Història de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

Joan Planella i Rodríguez’ The Little Weaver (1882-89) is a superb Naturalist painting with strong social content. This is a replica of the artist’s original completed in 1882. It shows a young girl working at a large and complex loom in Catalonia, as a man lurks in the background, keeping a watch over her. Machinery had no safety guards, and industrial accidents were commonplace.

Oslo, like other major Nordic cities, was small by comparison with Paris, and even in 1900 had a population of just 230,000, about the same size as Babylon at its height. Yet its growth in the nineteenth century was concerning many, including the artist and writer Christian Krohg.

Christian Krohg (1852–1925), Tired (1885), oil on canvas, 79.5 x 61.5 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.

His Tired from 1885 was part of a longer-term exploration of the theme of fatigue and sleep, particularly among mothers. The young woman seen here is no mother, but a seamstress, one of the 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.

Home work as a seamstress was seen at this time as the beginning of the descent into prostitution, a major theme in Krohg’s work. The paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives, which all too often led to prostitution. During the 1880s, therefore, in some countries in Europe, the sewing machine was seen as a precursor to a woman’s moral downfall, the top of the slippery slope.

Christian Krohg (1852–1925), Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87), oil on canvas, 211 x 326 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.

Just before Christmas 1886, 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. 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).

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’s exactly what happens.

Albertine is not 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 mottley 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.

Most of those who moved into the cities left relatives behind. Although their homes in the country may have been primitive, they realised that in the city they needed a constant supply of money to avoid falling into debt and risking eviction.

Erik Henningsen (1855–1930), Evicted (1892), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Statens Museum for Kunst (Den Kongelige Malerisamling), Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

This family of four has just been Evicted, as shown by Erik Henningsen in 1892. With them in the snowy street are their meagre possessions, including a saw implying the father is a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

For every young woman who succeeded as a fashionable milliner, there must have been thousands who became trapped in prolonged, exhausting labour, and a few who lost everything.

Arturo Michelena (1863–1898), Charity (1888), oil on canvas, 288.8 x 231.7 cm, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela. Wikimedia Commons.

This young mother and child in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 have shacked up in a hovel. A pair of bourgeois ladies have arrived to do their bit for charity, without which the mother and child would have starved and died of disease.

In the coming weeks and months, I aim to bring paintings of the reality of life for urban revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I hope you will join me.