The Third-Class Carriage

Realism in France

Honoré Daumier

The Third-Class Carriage

1864

Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 90.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A nursing mother, an old woman with a basket and a sleeping boy ride on a crowded wooden bench.

  • The Met says it takes up a lithograph from about ten years earlier.
  • It is unfinished; look for the grid of squaring lines used to transfer the design.
  • Daumier showed how ordinary people lived with the new railways and the industrial city.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Public Domain (Met Open Access)

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