Example Of The Third Class Carriage: Daumier And The Working Classes Essay

The Third Class Carriage. H. Daumier. c. 1862. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The 19th century was a period of great change. With the industrial revolution, the world was a different place and the lives of people from all classes changed radically. These changes were not always positive especially for the working classes. People moved to the big industrial cities where they worked in the factories for long hours and for minimum pay. They often started working as children and their living conditions were very bad. In France in particular, the 19th century was a period of turmoil. The Bourbon restoration, the 1848 revolution and the poverty in the streets of Paris played an important role in the creation of the realist movement in art.
Realism came as a reaction to Romanticism and the traditional representation of historical and fictional or mythological subjects in art. The realists chose to represent real life as they experienced it in the countryside or in the cities. In France, artists like Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet focused on real people and real circumstances depicting scenes from everyday life and the lower classes were often depicted performing their tiring and painful jobs. A great example of the latter is Millet’s The Gleaners, where three women are represented in the field bending in order to pick up the last seeds. Equally, Courbet represented scenes from the life in the countryside, but in the Burial at Ornans, he chose to depict a funeral in which he had the chance to show most of the social levels of the society of small town, making them –like Millet- the center of his art.
Another important realist artist was Honoré Daumier, who probably more than any of his contemporaries, focused on the working classes of his time and immortalized them through his works. Daumier was a painter, sculptor and lithographer and initially became famous for his satirical lithographs in which he commented on political and social events of 19th century France. Interestingly, it is a painting and not a lithograph that perhaps best displays the style, preoccupations and subject matter that made his work known not only for its artistic merit but also as a record of the times in which the artist lived.
Painted in c. 1862, The Third Class Carriage is today exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Its medium is oil on canvas and measures 25 ¾ x 35 ½ inches. The painting is unfinished and is one of three similar works created by the artist at the time. The scene is placed inside a train where a number of people travel. Their cloths denote that these are poor people, hence the name of the painting: third class carriage. In the foreground there is a group that stands out and probably depicts a family. In the center an older woman having a basket in her lap seems lost in her thoughts. On her right a boy leans on her sleeping. On her left a younger woman holds a baby, her gaze directed towards it. The lines are simple and few. The artist chose to draw only those lines necessary to outline his subjects while the sketching of the figures with black paint is visible. Yet the end result is surprisingly realistic. The colors are warm reminding those of the earth and overall dark, while light that enters from the two windows of the carriage illuminates the tired faces of the two women but leaves the sleeping boy in the shadows. Daumier saw his protagonists sympathetically. The characteristics of their faces are rough reflecting their hard work and difficult lives. Yet, they are dignified. Unlike Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, where the actual inhabitants of the town are depicted, these are not portraits of real people. Instead, they represent the masses of working poor in the French capital for which the Industrial Revolution had only negative effects. These people appear again and again in the work of Daumier in different circumstances.
The subject matter and the composition which places ordinary people in the foreground are typical of the realist movement. This is a scene from real life, dramatized perhaps, but not idealized. It is what was experienced daily by the vast majority of French citizens and as such it is an important chronicle of their lives. While Millet’s Gleaners represents an aspect of the life of the rural poor, Daumier’s Third Class Carriage depicts an aspect of the life of the urban poor. And like the Gleaners these people are representative of a whole class of people. Although ordinary people have been depicted in paintings before, like in the works of the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Brueghel the elder, the realists were the first to depict them in the place reserved for heroic actions of historical and mythological paintings.
It is safe therefore to conclude that Daumier’s The Third Class Carriage is a product of its times and of the realist movement. It follows the ideals of the realists and at the same time shows the concern of the artist about the effects of industrialization to his fellow citizens. In this respect, it is not simply a work of art, but also a historical document.