Wagon of the Third Class (Le Wagon de troisième classe) 1864 -Honoré Victorin Daumier

      This painting is the story of a family, depicitng three generations: young, middle-aged, and old. This gives the viewer a full spectrum of human life in the third class. Grown men are noticably absent implying that the women are attempting to make their way in the world alone. The weary face of the grandmother looks straight at the viewer, confronting them as if to convey the hardships that she has endured throughout her life. Additionally, the third-class family faces away from the rest of the passengers, which emphasizes its isolation and rejection from the rest of society. It is in quiet moments, such as riding in a shabby train car, that the weariness of the lives of the poor is captured. Daumier uses economy of line to keep his drawings simple and powerful.

      The inspiration for this piece came from the conditions of the third class as well as the railroad itself, which had affected all levels of society. The peasants in Daumier's painting might be traveling to the city in search of jobs since they recently lost theirs to the mechanization of agriculture.  The man who formerly hired the people in the third-class carriage to work his lands probably no longer needed them once he had a machine to do the work for him.

      William Thomas Walters commissioned the painting along with two others (showing the First and Second classes).      Daumier's other two paintings displayed better conditions than the ones shown in the Wagon of the Third Class. In The First-Class Carriage, there is almost no physical or psychological contact among its four well-dressed figures, whereas The Third-Class Carriage is tightly packed with an anonymous crowd of working-class men and women. This possibly was meant to convey that the third class was more human, or at least valued human contact more.

     

       Generally not making much money off of his paintings, Honoré Victorin Daumier was primarily a lithographer, so Le Wagon de troisième classe was one of his few commisions. Daumier was known to be very critical of the Bourgeoise in his art as well as sympathetic to the poor, which got him into trouble with the government on multiple occasions. He was imprisoned twice for cartoons drawn which satirized the rule of Louis Phillipe in 1832.