The Third-Class Carriage

The Third-Class Carriage

The Third-Class Carriage

Artist:Honoré Daumier (French, Marseilles 1808–1879 Valmondois)
Date:ca. 1862–64
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:25 3/4 x 35 1/2 in. (65.4 x 90.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

As a graphic artist and painter, Daumier chronicled the impact of industrialization on modern urban life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Here, he amplifies the subject of a lithograph made some ten years earlier: the hardship and quiet fortitude of third-class railway travelers. Bathed in light, the nursing mother, elderly woman, and sleeping boy emanate a serenity not often associated with public transport. Unfinished and squared for transfer, this picture closely corresponds to a watercolor of 1864 (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) and a roughly contemporary oil (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), but the sequence of the compositions remains unresolved.

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