The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Honoré Daumier · Le Wagon de troisième classe · an oil on canvas, wider than high, an easel picture · the inside of a third-class railway compartment: a mother and infant, an old woman and a sleeping boy on a wooden bench in front, the rows of passengers behind them facing out · painted about 1862 to 1864 and left unfinished · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · the work scored is this one canvas as it stands, unfinished; the larger and more finished oil in Ottawa, the watercolour, the other carriage pictures and the lithographs outside the unit
Mode
Realist figure painting of the urban poor, a caricaturist’s synthesis turned to gravity; one compartment painted as a condition, with no event in it
Mythos
The three ages of life on one bench; the journey as life’s passage, carried by the railway; the Madonna and Child and Saint Anne evoked in the mother and the old woman, not claimed
Phase
Painted about 1862 to 1864 and left unfinished; little known in the painter’s lifetime, one of the most reproduced pictures of its century since
Presentation
One easel canvas, oil, wider than high; three figures broadly built in the lower half, the crowd behind laid in rather than resolved; light from small side windows
Register
Grave and still: brown, ochre and grey green, one sustained note of fatigue and endurance, neither pity nor complaint
Scale
One compartment, one bench, three generations and a crowd of strangers behind them
Governing Proposition
Inside a third-class railway compartment three figures sit on a wooden bench, facing the viewer: at the left a young mother nursing an infant, at the centre an old woman with her hands folded over a basket on her lap, looking straight before her, and at the right a boy asleep against her, his head dropped. Behind them, facing out over their heads, the rows of the compartment crowd into the dark: men in top hats and caps, a few women, mostly dim. Light from small windows in the side wall falls across the three and grazes the rest. The wager of the canvas is that the poor packed into a modern machine of travel can be painted with the gravity of history painting, without pity and without anecdote, and that the arrangement of one compartment can show what that machine makes of people: proximity without community, endurance held in the body, and a family carried intact and alone among strangers.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Honoré Daumier (1808 to 1879), lithographer, caricaturist, sculptor and painter, painted Le Wagon de troisième classe, The Third-Class Carriage, about 1862 to 1864. It is oil on canvas, wider than high, an easel picture, and it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The work scored here is that one canvas as it stands, unfinished. The larger and more finished oil of the same composition in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the watercolour of the subject, the related oils of first- and second-class carriages and the many lithographs of railway travel Daumier drew for Le Charivari are context and are not scored.
Caricature was Daumier’s trade, and the railway was already one of its subjects. Painting was another matter. He painted largely for himself and a few friends, his painting was little known in his lifetime, and this canvas carried no public wager. What he brought to it from the print was a power of synthesis: the figures reduced to masses and contours, the comic exaggeration of the caricaturist gone and the economy kept, so that a head is a few planes and a pair of hands is one shape.
The canvas was left unfinished. The three figures in front are given substance; the heads at the back are laid in rather than resolved, and the space of the compartment at the upper right is summary. That is the state in which the maker left it, and it is scored as such: not as a loss, since nothing that carries the meaning is missing, and not as a gain either. Some read the open surface as a virtue; the desk does not credit it as one, and it charges the unresolved passages to the making.
Movement II
The lower half of the canvas is one wooden bench and three figures on it, facing the viewer. At the left a young mother holds an infant at her breast. At the centre an old woman sits with her hands folded over a basket on her lap and looks straight before her. At the right a boy is asleep against her, his head dropped. The palette is brown, ochre and grey green, and the light from the side windows falls across the three of them.
Each of them bears load. The old woman is the axis of the picture, its stillness and its weight. The mother and infant put the beginning of life on the same bench as its end. The sleeping boy is the one figure who has given up the waiting, and his slump against the old woman is the only touch in the carriage, between kin or strangers; his sleep is also the furthest point of withdrawal in a picture where everyone is withdrawn. Take any of the three away and the bench no longer holds a life from end to end.
The three ages of life are set side by side, and they are built into the composition, not alluded to: the whole picture is the bench. The nursing mother carries the old image of the Madonna and Child, and the old woman beside her an echo of Saint Anne, but these are evoked, not claimed, and the particulars stay particular, a basket, a shawl, a hard wooden seat. The journey as life’s passage is the deepest pattern, and the railway carries it with no symbol added. The archetype is a resonance of the arrangement more than its structure, and the Holy Family is brought to the canvas more than built in it.
Movement III
Behind the three, facing out over their heads, are the rows of the compartment: men in top hats and caps, a few women, crowded and mostly dim. This is the key choice of the picture. Without the rows the three would be a genre group of the poor; with them, the three become part of a crowd that does not look at them, and the crowd, facing out, looks at us. The viewer sits on the bench opposite, a passenger among them, inside the arrangement.
What the canvas brings into the open can be stated. The modern machine of travel sorts people by the price of a ticket and then packs them in together: proximity without community, a crowd in which each sits enclosed in fatigue. Endurance is the life of the poor, and it is shown held in the body, in the folded hands and the dropped head, not told as an incident. The family carries itself through the new world intact and alone, and the top hats behind are the faces of strangers. The old woman’s look is neither appeal nor complaint: the picture refuses pity and the picturesque alike. These are meanings, not a mood, and they hold in any bus or underground car.
Painting is the form that knows this. It holds a carriage in motion in an instant with no event in it, so that waiting itself becomes the subject, which a narrative could only describe. The breadth of the handling is the anonymity: the faces at the back are reduced to tone and the three in front are given substance, so that finish itself ranks attention. The condition was not new to the 1860s, which had it in Daumier’s own prints, in Baudelaire’s prose and in the poor of Courbet and Millet; the canvas states it with unusual gravity more than it first uncovers it, and the same composition survives, with much of its knowledge, in a watercolour and in another oil.
Movement IV
Light enters from small windows along the side wall at the upper left and right and falls across faces and shoulders. It is placed to rank the figures: full on the old woman and on the mother’s bent head, grazing the crowd behind. The dim crowd gives the light its weight. The old woman, built up from broad masses like a modelled head, sits in it with a stillness that turns a tired passenger into something monumental.
The making is load-bearing, and its strength is the drawing. Daumier, who also modelled clay heads, builds the old woman’s head and hands as masses, held by a contour drawn in dark paint; the folded hands over the basket are a few planes. The colour is restricted and sure, earth and grey green. The costs are charged: the background heads are laid in and not resolved, the compartment is summary at the upper right. The command of drawing is greater than the command of paint as surface.
One law governs the carriage, from the lit old woman at the front to the dim top hats at the back: every figure is enclosed in itself, pressed into the same box, carried by the same machine, and ranked by the light and by finish, attention falling off with distance. Nothing contradicts it, and no figure acts or performs. The height it reaches is a quiet one, a solemnity rather than a transport, and it rises only in the three in front: there is no terror, no grandeur of scale and no lift of colour. The law holds completely over a small range, one compartment and one register of fatigue and endurance.
Movement V
The turn the canvas made is deep. It takes the genre painting of the poor and the Realism of Courbet and Millet out of the field and into a modern machine, and it gives the urban poor, without anecdote, the gravity of history painting; one of the first paintings to make the crowd of modern transport its whole subject. The stake was small. Daumier painted largely for himself and a few friends, the broad finish ran against the Salon’s surface, and the canvas’s reach came late. In its own decade Daumier’s reach ran through his lithographs; the paintings were taken up afterwards. Van Gogh’s admiration of Daumier is documented in his letters, and the line of the urban poor through Picasso’s Blue Period, German Expressionism and later social realism is commonly traced to him, though the share of this one canvas in it cannot be separated.
Its yield is real and steady: whether the old woman’s look is endurance, resignation or reproach, whether the three are one family or strangers, whether the picture is sympathy or detachment, a socialist image or a Baudelairean one, how much of its effect belongs to its unfinished state, and how it differs in meaning from the Ottawa canvas. Return deepens these more than it overturns them. After about a hundred and sixty years the canvas is whole as its maker left it, thinly seen in its first decades and since then one of the most reproduced pictures of its century. Its orders are the family, labour and class, the city and its machine, the closed consciousness of each face and the sacred only by echo; there is no state, no history beyond what the railway implies and no nature beyond the windows.
The desk sets it a tenth below Stieglitz’s The Steerage at 8.1, the nearest subject on the visual desk, passengers sorted by class on a machine of travel, a photograph that turned its own medium and reached further; a tenth below Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day at 8.1, the modern Parisian crowd seen from the other end of the social order, nearly level in sum, the finished and exactly built picture against the unfinished one; and a tenth below Wilder’s The Apartment at 8.1, the city’s anonymous many and one person’s endurance inside them. Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga at 8.2 and Millet’s The Gleaners at 8.4, staked publicly at the Salon with the larger reach and the fuller making, stand above it, and Gogol’s The Overcoat at 8.8, the founding text of the poor man in the modern city, stands well above. On the bench the old woman still looks straight before her, her hands folded over the basket, the boy asleep against her and the crowd behind them facing us.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, figure by figure. The old woman cannot go: she is the axis of the picture, its stillness and its weight. The mother and infant cannot go: they put the beginning of life on the same bench as its end. The sleeping boy cannot go: he is the one figure who has given up the waiting, and his slump against the old woman is the only touch in the carriage. The rows behind cannot go either, and they are the key choice: without them the three are a genre group of the poor; seated behind them and facing out, they make the three part of a crowd that does not look at them. What yields is the crowd at the upper right, laid in rather than resolved, and some of the left wall: permitted margins, not idle parts.
Score: 8.2 / 10
A condition can be stated, and it holds. The modern machine of travel sorts people by the price of a ticket and then packs them in together: proximity without community, a crowd in which each sits enclosed in fatigue. Endurance is the life of the poor, and the canvas shows it held in the body, in the folded hands and the dropped head, not as an incident. The three generations disclose a second meaning: the family carries itself through the new world intact and alone, among strangers in top hats. The picture refuses both pity and the picturesque. Held below the gate because Daumier’s own prints, Baudelaire’s prose and the poor of Courbet and Millet had already stated much of this: the canvas states it with unusual gravity more than it first uncovers it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is of one kind, and it is real: gravity. The old woman, built up from broad masses like a modelled head, sits with a stillness that turns a tired passenger into something monumental; light from the side windows falls on her and on the mother’s bent head, and the dim crowd behind gives that light its weight. It is a quiet height, a solemnity rather than a transport, and it recurs only in the three in front; the crowd is the condition, not a second summit. There is no terror, no grandeur of scale and no lift of colour, which is brown and earth throughout. The axis asks for height and frequency, and the canvas holds one sustained note at a middle height.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Partly built. The three ages on one bench, the infant at the breast, the old woman, the sleeping child, are the ages of life set side by side, and they are built into the composition, not alluded to: the whole picture is the bench. The nursing mother carries the old image of the Madonna and Child, and the old woman beside her an echo of Saint Anne; this is evoked, not claimed, and the particulars stay wholly particular, a basket, a shawl, a hard wooden seat. The journey as life’s passage is the deepest pattern, carried by the railway with no symbol added. Held below the gate because the archetype is a resonance of the composition rather than its load-bearing structure, and viewers bring the Holy Family more than the canvas builds it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance: Dutch and French genre painting of the poor, the Realism of Courbet and Millet in the 1840s and 1850s, and Daumier’s own trade of caricature, where the railway was already a subject. The departure: the urban poor in a modern machine, not peasants in a field and not an anecdote, painted with a caricaturist’s power of synthesis turned to gravity, the figures reduced to masses and contours with no comic exaggeration left, the space a box, the crowd facing out so that the viewer sits in the opposite seat. The broad finish ran against the Salon’s surface. The stake was private: Daumier painted largely for himself and a few friends, and this canvas carried no public wager. A deep turn, a small stake.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and much of what the canvas knows goes. Painting gives the stillness: a carriage in motion held in an instant with no event in it, so that waiting itself is the subject, which a narrative could only describe. The frontal composition puts the viewer on the bench opposite, a passenger among them, and the crowd faces us over the heads of the three, so that the viewer is inside the arrangement. The breadth of the handling is the anonymity: the faces at the back are reduced to tone and the three in front given substance, so that finish itself ranks attention. Held below the top because Daumier carried the same composition in watercolour and in another oil, and the railway in lithographs, with much of the knowledge kept.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: about a hundred and sixty years, the first decades nearly silent, since Daumier’s painting was little known in his lifetime and real attention came later, above all in the twentieth century. The questions that stay open are real: whether the old woman’s look is endurance, resignation or reproach; whether the three are one family or strangers; whether the picture is sympathy or detachment, a socialist image or a Baudelairean one; how much of its effect belongs to its unfinished state; how the New York and Ottawa versions differ in meaning. The canvas yields on return in the drawing of the hands and in the crowd. Held below the top because the reading has been stable for a century: return deepens the core meaning rather than overturning it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is French painting of the 1860s. Intrinsic force: one of the first paintings to make the crowd of modern transport its whole subject, the anonymous public of the city treated with the gravity of history painting, a real enlargement of what a painting of the poor could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was delayed and partly indirect. Daumier’s painting was barely seen by the painters of his decade, and his reach then ran through his lithographs. The paintings were taken up later. Van Gogh’s admiration of Daumier is documented in his letters, and the line of the urban poor in Picasso’s Blue Period, German Expressionism and later social realism is commonly traced to him, though the share of this one canvas cannot be separated. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Score: 7.9 / 10
About a hundred and sixty years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole as left. The canvas is unfinished, but that is the state in which the maker left it, not a loss; nothing that carried its meaning is gone. Presence: thin in the first decades, little shown in the painter’s life; since then in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and one of the most reproduced images of the nineteenth century, which is presence and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, with no damage to state. The thin early presence keeps it at the lower edge of its row, and the reproduction does not lift it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the drawing. Daumier, who also modelled clay heads, builds the old woman’s head and hands as masses, held by a contour drawn in dark paint; the folded hands over the basket are a few planes. The light from the side windows is placed to rank the figures, falling on the three in front and grazing the crowd. The colour is restricted and sure, earth and grey green. The costs are charged: the canvas is unfinished, the background heads are laid in and not resolved, and the space of the compartment is summary at the upper right. The command of drawing is greater than the command of paint as surface.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the old woman, lit and monumental at the front, and the dim heads in top hats at the back. One law holds them: every figure in the carriage is enclosed in itself, pressed into the same box, carried by the same machine, and ranked by the light and by finish. The crowd’s anonymity and the substance of the three are one physics, attention falling off with distance; even the sleeping boy, the one figure turned away, obeys it, his sleep the furthest point of withdrawal. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law, and no figure acts or performs. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one compartment, one register of fatigue and endurance, governed completely over a small range.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: the family, in three generations on one bench; labour and class, in the basket, the clothes and the price of the ticket; the modern city and its technology, in the railway and the crowd it makes; consciousness, as the inwardness of each closed face and of sleep; the sacred only in the evoked Madonna. They are integrated, since the bench and the carriage hold them in one structure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no history beyond what the railway implies, no natural order beyond the light at the windows. It is an easel picture of one compartment, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4 and The Made at 8.3. A canvas whole as its maker left it after about a hundred and sixty years and one of the most reproduced pictures of its century; a stated condition, proximity without community and endurance held in the body, given without pity; one law of enclosure, light and finish holding from the lit old woman to the dim top hats; and a drawing that carries the meaning, the head and hands built as masses and held by a dark contour.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the family, labour and class, the city and its machine and the inwardness of each face, held on one bench, with no state, no history beyond the railway and no nature beyond the windows. Then The Sublime at 7.5: one sustained note of gravity at a middle height, rising only in the three in front. Then The Swerve at 7.8 and The Bottomless Well at 7.8: a deep turn on a private stake, and a reading stable for a century that return deepens rather than overturns. Then The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: the ages of life built and the Holy Family only evoked, and a reach delayed and run largely through the prints.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 and The Swerve at 7.8 fall short of it, the condition stated with gravity more than first uncovered, the archetype a resonance more than a structure, the reach delayed and run largely through the prints, and the turn deep but the stake private. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below The Sublime at 7.5, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.5, an average of 8.042 that displays 8.0, in Tier IV, at the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the painting: well as an image and as a composition, the bench, the three figures, the crowd behind and the light; moderately as an object, its surface, its state and its history known in outline only. The canvas was not measured, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is one object, the oil on canvas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, painted about 1862 to 1864, as it stands, unfinished: Honoré Daumier, Le Wagon de troisième classe (The Third-Class Carriage). The larger and more finished oil of the same composition in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the watercolour of the subject, the oils of first- and second-class carriages and the lithographs of railway travel for Le Charivari are context and are not scored. Only the title is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dimensions, the museum’s credit line and the year the canvas entered it, the dating of the Ottawa oil, the date and whereabouts of the watercolour, whether the canvas was squared for transfer and the squaring shows, the number of heads in the crowd, any signature or inscription, whether the canvas has been continuously on view, the retrospective that brought the painter’s painting to notice, and which painters collected his lithographs. No line of influence is claimed for this one canvas; the line of the urban poor from Daumier is stated as commonly traced to him.