Der Wagen dritter Klasse

By the 1860s the railway had reshaped how ordinary French people moved, and the cheapest carriages were crowded, hard-benched, and open to anyone. Daumier had spent decades as a newspaper caricaturist watching city life, and he kept returning to these third-class travellers. Here a nursing mother, an old woman with a basket, and a sleeping boy sit in the front row, softly lit and lost in their own tiredness, while the carriage behind them fills with a blur of other passengers. He never finished this version. Look closely and you can still see the grid of thin squaring lines he drew to transfer the design, and the dark outlines left waiting for paint that never came.