Urban Revolutionaries: 13 Holidays

Before the arrival of railways in the middle of the nineteenth century, travel was slow, and holidays were optional. Most of the working class in cities were grateful to get one day off each week, and in many cases that was Sunday to be spent in church. Most employers allowed their workers as little time off as they could get away with, and those who weren’t there simply weren’t paid.

By the 1870s, cotton workers in Lancashire saved all year and took a week’s unpaid leave to travel by train to stay on the coast, in what were known as Wakes Weeks. These allowed mill and factory owners to shut production down for that week in the summer to perform maintenance, while their workers recuperated by the sea.

Public holidays, officially known as Bank Holidays because banks were allowed to close for the day, weren’t introduced in England until 1871, and even then consisted of just four days a year, and remained that few for the next century. Workers had no right to any paid holiday until 1938, when employers were required to provide them with one week a year in addition to Bank Holidays.

Eugène Lepoittevin (1806-1870), Bathing, Étretat Beach (1864), media and dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Eugène Lepoittevin’s Bathing, Étretat Beach shows French families enjoying the beach in 1864, and their first tentative steps in the development of beach and swimwear. Those shown are all middle class, well-dressed and hardly taking unpaid time away from the factory.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), La Grenouillère (1869), oil on canvas, 66.5 x 81 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Wikimedia Commons.

Similar groups are shown visiting the bathing resort of La Grenouillère in the summer of 1869, in one of Auguste Renoir’s masterworks from early Impressionism. This is located a short distance downstream on the River Seine from Paris, and easily reachable by train.

Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922), Tréport, Bathing Time (1882), oil on canvas, 50.5 x 80.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1882 at Le Tréport on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, Évariste Carpentier’s Le Tréport, Bathing Time again shows members of the middle class dressed in the latest beachwear. The young woman to the right of centre may still have her head wrapped in a bonnet, but you can see her lower legs and all her arm, almost to the shoulder. It’s noticeable that several heads have turned to look at her, as she walks in her sandals along the wooden walkway.

William Powell Frith (1819–1909), Ramsgate Sands (1854), media and dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The railway came to Ramsgate in 1846, and with it the masses from London in search of a ‘cure’ from its waters. William Powell Frith holidayed there in 1851, when he made his first preparatory sketches for his painting of Ramsgate Sands (1854). On its beach is a more eclectic mixture of classes, reflected in their clothing and activities, although I still can’t see many from London’s factories or market-barrows.

William S Horton (1865–1936), Punch on the Beach at Broadstairs, England (1920), oil on canvas, 64.5 × 78.1 cm, Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1920 William S Horton painted this Punch and Judy show taking place on the beach at Broadstairs, Kent, a traditional family beach resort at the extreme eastern tip of the south-east coast of England. Most if not all are visibly well-dressed and hardly working class.

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Swimming in Horst – Ostsee (1902), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Bavaria. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1902 Lovis Corinth visited the south coast of the Baltic, where he painted Swimming in Horst – Ostsee, now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

There are a few paintings showing lower classes in America away from their labours, though.

George Bellows (1882–1925), Forty-two Kids (1907), oil on canvas, 106.7 × 153 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids from 1907 shows unruly youths at play by the water near a dilapidated wharf on New York City’s East River. These are from poor migrant families inhabiting overcrowded neighbourhoods in Manhattan’s East Side.