Famous as a cartoonist, blind, and broke

The story of what happened to this painting only lands if you know what happened to its painter, and it is a hard story. By the mid-1860s — right around when he was working this very canvas — Daumier was sinking. The newspaper work that had kept him afloat for decades was drying up; money ran short. He left Paris for a small house in the village of Valmondois, north of the city, and there he might well have been evicted but for a friend. The great landscape painter Camille Corot— a gentle, generous man and a fellow traveler of the Realists — stepped in to help; by the well-known account, Corot quietly arranged the house so that Daumier would have a roof for the rest of his life. One painter the public adored, kept off the street by another painter’s charity.

Then the cruelest blow for a man who lived by his eyes: he went blind. Through the 1870s Daumier’s sight failed, and by about 1873 he could barely see. The hand that had drawn four thousand of the sharpest images in France could no longer draw. He spent his last years in the country, nearly sightless and very poor, the oils he had painted in private still piled up, still unsold, still unseen.

In 1878, one year before he died, the art world finally turned to look. A retrospective exhibition of his work — held at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris — gathered the paintings and drawings together and let people see, perhaps for the first time, that the famous cartoonist had been a major artist all along. It was the recognition he had earned and never received. It came decades late, and it came in a body going blind, and — the final indignity — the exhibition lost money. Daumier died the next year, in 1879, poor to the end. He never knew that the quiet oils nobody would buy would one day be treasured above almost everything he had drawn.

The rescue, when it finally came, came from across an ocean. In 1913, more than thirty years after Daumier’s death, the American collector Louisine Havemeyer bought The Third-Class Carriage — reportedly for around forty thousand dollars, an enormous sum for a picture its own painter could not sell. Havemeyer was no ordinary buyer. Her husband was H. O. Havemeyer, the American sugar magnate (the family fortune came from refining sugar), and his money paid for the art — but the eye was hers, sharpened by her friend the painter Mary Cassatt(an American painter who championed French Impressionism and steered great American collections toward it). Guided by Cassatt for years, the Havemeyers assembled one of the greatest collections of modern French art anywhere, and made it their mission to bring that art to the United States. A canvas painted for nobody, by a man the public knew only as a newspaper cartoonist, ended up a prize of one of America’s grandest collections.

And then she gave it away. On her death, the painting came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a bequest — that is, a gift left in her will — in 1929, part of the celebrated H. O. Havemeyer Collection. (The provenance has one honest gap: the exact chain of owners between Daumier’s studio and Havemeyer’s purchase is not securely documented — but the two ends, the broke painter and the New York museum, are certain.) So the unfinished picture of the poorest seats on a French train now hangs, permanently, in one of the richest museums in the world. You can stand in front of it any day the Met is open.

Sit with the whole arc for a second, because it is one of art history’s great reversals. A man known to all of France as a cartoonist painted, in private, the people nobody painted — the urban poor on a third-class bench, a nursing mother, an old woman with her basket, a sleeping boy, a crowd of strangers dissolving into the dark. He never finished it; he never sold it; he died blind and broke; and the picture became famous precisely because it was broken, its working grid showing through. Then it crossed an ocean to become a treasure of New York.

What survives all of that is the thing Daumier actually put on the canvas: the radical, quiet idea that the people in the cheapest seats are worth the most careful looking. No pity, no charm, no sob story — just three strangers on a hard bench, granted the full weight and seriousness of serious art. That was Realism’s whole wager, made by Courbet in a village graveyard and by Millet in a stubble field; Daumier made it on a train. Every later artist who has pointed a serious brush, or lens, at an anonymous crowd in a modern city — at the people history files under and others — is riding in the carriage Daumier painted first.