The cheapest seats on a moving machine

For most of human history, a poor person travelled the way their grandparents had: on foot, or not at all. Then, in the space of about thirty years, France laced itself with iron. The railway — steam engines hauling long strings of carriages along metal tracks — went from a curiosity in the 1830s to the ordinary spine of the country by the 1860s, and suddenly a laborer, a market-woman, a tired mother with a baby could buy a ticket and sit in a moving box with a hundred strangers, going somewhere. It is hard, now, to feel how strange that was. A whole new kind of human experience had been invented: being crammed together with people you will never see again, in transit, going nowhere in particular together. That experience is the subject of this painting.

And it had a price tier. Railways sold tickets in three grades. First class meant an upholstered, enclosed compartment — padding, privacy, comfort. Second class was plainer. Third class — the title of this picture — was the cheapest seat there was: hard wooden benches, the most crowded car, sometimes barely sheltered, the carriage where the poor rode because it was all they could afford. To name a painting The Third-Class Carriage in 1860s France was to point, very specifically, at the bottom of the new system. Everyone knew exactly which seats those were, and who sat in them.

Now the strange part: the man who painted this was, to all of France, not a painter at all. He was a cartoonist. Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) earned his living for some forty years drawing for the satirical newspapers — La Caricature and Le Charivari — and he was magnificent at it, turning out more than four thousand lithographs over his career. A lithograph (the cheap mass-printing method of the day: you draw with a greasy crayon on a flat slab of limestone, then run off hundreds of identical copies) was the engine of the illustrated press, and Daumier was its great talent — the sharpest pen in Paris, skewering politicians, lawyers, landlords, the smug and the powerful, week after week, for decades. If you lived in nineteenth-century France and you knew the name Daumier, you knew it from the newspaper, the way you might know a great editorial cartoonist today.

That fame came at a cost. As a young man in 1831 he drew his most notorious cartoon, Gargantua — the king, Louis-Philippe, as a bloated giant on a throne, swallowing the people’s taxes shoveled up a ramp into his mouth and excreting favors to his cronies — and the regime threw him in jail for it (six months, by the standard account). That drawing has its own deep read one shelf over in this app; it is the Daumier you are supposed to know, the fearless caricaturist. The man who quietly painted The Third-Class Carriage in oil is the same person, twenty years on, doing something almost nobody saw him do.

Because here is the thing that makes Daumier’s paintings so strange and so moving: he made them almost in secret, and almost nobody bought them. From the 1840s onward he painted seriously — small, dark, hand-worked oils of the people he saw every day: laundresses hauling washing up the riverbank, lawyers preening in court, families on the move, crowds in the street. But these were not his job. His job was the newspaper. The paintings piled up in the studio, exhibited rarely, sold barely at all. The public that adored Daumier the cartoonist had no idea that Daumier the painter existed. He was, in effect, running a second, invisible career in oil paint — the one that, a century later, would turn out to matter most.

He did not arrive at the railway cold, either. Daumier had been drawing train travel for years in the newspaper — a whole lithograph series on the railways (Les Chemins de fer) ran in Le Charivari across the 1840s and 50s, the modern machine treated as the comic, crowded, slightly absurd new fact of life it was. The painting grew out of that long looking. By the early 1860s he had moved the third-class carriage from the funny pages onto a canvas, and stopped joking. What had been a gag about the crush and chaos of modern travel became, in oil, something quiet and grave — a picture of the people in those cheap seats, painted as if they mattered. The next chapter is what that looks like.