Daumier's Third-Class Carriage

Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, recognized as one of the greatest caricaturist of the 19th century. His career was focused around the culture of the working class people, and, he was an essential part to the reconfiguration of popular culture and the undoing of the bourgeois hegemony that had been created around the working class. His work granted the voice of ‘the people’ center stage.
Unlike his contemporaries, artists like Manet and Caillebotte, who focused on the spectacle and grandeur of Hausmannization, Daumier emerged as a member of the lower- class and represented aspects of life for this social group in his work. Mostly known for his satirical work targeting political figures and bourgeois culture, Daumier takes on a somber attitude in his painting, Third-Class Carriage completed around 1862. His painting style, the reflection of his disinterest for bourgeois culture, is untrained and uneducated. Although the artist’s intentions are difficult to decipher, this painting is successful in articulating a realistic scene because he consciously strips his work of anything having to do with High-Art, presenting a clear depiction of working class life, as he knows it. His choice of subject matter grants us quite a unique and rarely seen perspective of life in Paris, France during the period of Industrialization.
Daumier received little training as an artist; his career was mainly focused on lithography and caricatures. As such, the Third-Class Carriage reflects the same stylistic techniques found in his caricatures. According to Scharf, author of “Daumier The Painter,” most of Daumier’s paintings were undated and unsigned. By comparing this painting to his lithographic works, however, a date can be estimated to the early 1860’s. This specific image was never actually finished, but corresponds closely to a watercolor of 1864.
Although Daumier never made a big name for himself in the art world, he was well known for his philosophical attitude. His imprisonment in August 1832 at St. Pelagíe for the creation of a caricature showing King Louis Phillipe as Gargantua, marked a definite change in his life. According to Elizabeth Cary, author of “Daumier’s Unconquerable Soul,” Daumier came out as an artist of stamp and originality, which reflected in his works. As Sharf explains, Daumier gave the world the poetry of the radicals not a mirrored image of the world the average bourgeois felt he owned. Thus, his work, along with the work of Courbet and Millet, reflects the beginnings of modern art; it rejected notions of bourgeois culture and worked against art critics’ expectations of the time.
In the Third-Class Carriage, Daumier speaks an invisible truth about urban life in the period of industrialization. When we imagine Paris during the later part of the 19th century, we imagine a world of spectacle and leisure. The ‘Hausmannization’ of Paris during the 1860’s re-invented the city into a well-organized modern metropolis. The wide boulevards, shops and tall bourgeois apartments characteristic of Paris today, were all the result of this transformation. New railroad stations connecting the city to the countryside provided the opportunity for weekend leisure. All Parisians, however, did not enjoy the new dawning in Paris and the benefits of development.
Daumier’s painting, for example, reflects a brutally honest truth of life for the working class, even when they traveled. He does not have to work hard at arriving at this truth, as a member of the working class he knows exactly what it looks like, but he does use stylistic conventions to portray his message better. The Third-Class Carriage speaks of no luxury; there is no room for the leisure in this image. It depicts a cluster of working-class people packed into what reads as a dirty train carriage. There is little movement; in fact most figures do not recognize that they are being observed; several of them are even turned away from the viewer. Unlike, The Uprising, completed in 1848, another painting by Daumier, which reads as dynamic and menacing to the conservative regime in place, this image is subdued. It gives us a world of anonymous figures that sit quietly, and suffer the discomfort of their travels silently. It is evocative because of the passive quality of the subject matter in which we realize that modernity does not better life for everybody; some people will always be socially and economically disfranchised.
Daumier’s background in lithography provided him with a different set of tools than those available to other painters. It is almost as if he attempted to translate a print-image unto a painting. The paint is laid in what can be described as a ‘naïve manner.’ The marks of brushstrokes are evident, especially in the black used to exemplify the old and ragged train carriage, as well as the worn hats, suitcases and clothes. Black lines outline the contours of the figures in the image. These lines are somewhat grotesque; they are thick and aggressive, only elevating the “primitiveness” by which we understand this image. There are brutal transitions from dark to light; the figures emerge from the shadows with a few hints of light touching their somber faces.
The abstract rendition of the faces lets us understand that these are all anonymous characters. Daumier modeled figures through shadows and changes in tonality, a technique that is impossible to imitate. His ability to close in on the figures while providing the viewer with a notion of anonymity and unimportance of their character is astonishing. Most of the figures in the image have the essential facial features necessary to create the proper illusion but if we look closely, they are almost mask like. According to Scharf, Daumier tended to model subjects in clay as models from which he would draw and paint. This is why his figures in the painting have a fleshy quality to them, as if their faces were easily malleable or as if they had been squeezed and molded into shape by hand.
The sienna tinted background is dull. It serves to articulate the plain walls and roof of the train carriage, while bringing the figures to the foreground. As Scharf expresses in his essay, “ The sun never shines in Daumier’s paintings.” Although a dramatic light illuminates the figures, the atmosphere that he creates in the image is melancholic. We need only look at the expression on some of the faces to understand their resignation. The scene provides a sense of the old and rustic. The emotion and sense of tragedy that is evoked in the image is created through the atmosphere that envelops the figures. By limiting his color palette to browns and blacks he creates a monotonous environment inside the cart only relieved by the light coming in through the window. The color on the benches and walls of the train cart are faded. The clothes on the figures look worn and faded, even dirty. Through this unusual technique– only paralleled by Courbet and Millet– Daumier’s power and originality in the arts comes form his ability to depict and create a clear understanding that what we are looking at is an image of working class people; we do not question it.
The painting is small in scale making the image intimate. By focusing on a very specific moment, time, and place, it begs the viewer to come close and observe the figures that make part of the image. The most interesting figure is the elderly woman in the center of the composition; she almost divides the image in half. She sits tiredly, yet her expression is somewhat dignified. Her eyes become the focal point of the picture as she invites us in with her gaze, emerging from the shadows and given center-stage by the soft light that illuminates her.
Social classes during the 19th century determined how people lived and interacted with each other. Modernization increased the standard of living for Parisians, but it also widened the wealth gap. People were distinguished and characterized by their occupations, education, dress and culture. All factors in this painting point to the characterization of working class people. These people were most likely workers in manufacturing, service industries, hand-crafters; they depended on wages and their physical skills. The figures seem to know and understand some kind of reality that the bourgeois individuals in Caillebotte’s or Manet’s paintings cannot even begin to comprehend. This is especially true of the elderly woman; her expression seems to suggest that she knows modernity does not bring leisure and comfort to everyone, even when traveling.
The Third-Class Carriage does not read as an image of leisure or provide a notion of individuals about to experience the world. During the 19th c. third-class carriages had five seats to each wooden bench. In comparison, first class carriages were comfortable, had plush armrests on the chairs and sat three people per bench. Second class travelers had soft seats but did not have armrests on their chairs. The display and marvel of modernization only reached so far; Hausmannization actually led to the eviction of the working class from the center of the city down to the outskirts. We can therefore imagine that these individuals could be making their way from home into the center of the city to earn their hourly wage.
It is interesting to notice that most of the men in the carriage wear top hats. A secondary effect of ‘Hausmmanization’ was the creation of a passive society preoccupied with appearance and consumerism. During the latter part of the 19th century, top hats were associated with the upper classes and understood as symbols of respectability. Top hats however, became popular among all classes, even work-men wore them. Their hats were simply made of inexpensive materials such as rabbit fur. In the midst of a society that was developing around the culture of ‘appearance’ it would not be far-fetched to suggest that these men are working-class people, and, they simply wish to pass-off as solid members of the middle class. This is especially articulated by the male figure sitting at the back of the carriage on the right side of the image. He looks directly at us. His expression is somewhat startling, as if he were desperately trying to pass-off for something he is not, knowing that he is being watched and his class standing is being questioned.
Another possible explanation for the top hats is that train fares ranged tremendously during this period. Many middle class people saved their money and traveled in third-class carriages. This is especially plausible when we observe the man sitting at the left edge of the composition. We only see his profile, but he looks pretty well put together; he reads as a respectable and content older man.
The Third-Class Carriage is a bleak depiction of life in 19th century France. By 1862, the year in which this image is believed to have been produced, Daumier was old and sick. As Heta Kauppinen explains in, “Aging in Art” the representation of the elderly in paintings is a powerful way to transmit messages of values, beliefs and convictions. As age and disease plighted Daumier, perhaps he aimed to transmit a message to younger generations of the injustices that came with the period of modernization. By portraying the stages of life, represented by the figures in the pictorial foreground, he creates this understanding. The boy sleeps pleasantly still untouched by the ways of the world. The woman to the left uninhibitedly nurtures her child who now depends on her to provide food and shelter. As a member of the lower class however, she will struggle to make a living and provide for her baby. Finally, we see the elderly woman who welcomed us as the viewer into her world, clearly aware of the inequalities that are perpetuated by the ideologies we hold and of the hardships of belonging to the lower-class tier.
The value in Daumier’s painting lies in his ability to create a scene that is pure and real. We could view The Third-Class Carriage as an artistically untrained painting with little merit. Most definitely, it is preposterous to think that this painting could have ever made it into the Paris Salon of the 1860’s. The choice of theme and stylistic qualities of the painting, however are precisely what give it merit today. This manner of painting is impossible to imitate and thus, it grants Daumier a solid place in the history of 19th century art. As such, this image should really be viewed as a powerful undertaking because it is a culturally untainted version of life in Paris for the working class. As an artist, Daumier was fortunate to be a member of the working class because this alone liberated him from any links to bourgeoisie ideologies and from traditional modes of representation. His background also entitled him to using the lower class as a theme for his work, because only a person that belonged to this class could properly represent ‘the people’ of 19th century France. Consequently, this image allows us to comprehend that Daumier was an essential part of the evolution of visual representation during this period.

Bibliography

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Metropolitan Museum of Art. Honore Daumier: Third-Class Carriage. New York. 14 Nov. 2009.

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Image: Artstor.com Daumier's Third-Class Carriage.