During the nineteenth century social realism depicted poverty in the countryside, but that of the growing cities was seldom depicted until it was tackled by the Naturalists later in the century.

Some earlier attempts were based on deception.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s photo of Poor Jo from 1864 shows a young streetboy, in a pioneering collection of images of homeless children in England. Being an early photo, it cannot of course lie, but it does. This photo, as with all Rejlander’s other images of poor and vagrant children, was a fiction created in his studio, using props and models, and heavily retouched. We tend to think of such trickery as a modern phenomenon enabled by the likes of Photoshop; although the techniques were different, visual deception is far older.

It was an English writer, Charles Dickens, who was probably the greatest literary influence over Augustus Edwin Mulready, whose reputation was built on paintings of street sellers and vagrants in London, such as his Uncared For from 1871. Mulready’s approach was very different from either Dickens or Millet, in being laden with sentimentalism. Here a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes stares straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Both the girl and her brother are sparklingly clean, their hair well cared-for, and their clothes relatively smart. There is nothing to suggest that Mulready used real vagrants as his models.

More convincing, though, are the remains of posters on the brick wall behind them: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

When Doré visited London, he was shocked by its large population of vagrants and homeless. His print of A Couple and Two Children Sleeping on a London Bridge (1871) is one of several objective records he made at the time. A selection was included in his illustrated book on London published the following year.

Change continued in this challenging painting by the Naturalist Jean-Eugène Buland, Alms of a Beggar from 1880. A young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin.

In the early 1880s Fernand Pelez started to paint some of the most moving portraits of the poor, comparable to those of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Marie Bashkirtseff.

This early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress (c 1880) is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. Another showed a young woman dead from asphyxiation. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Italy it was Antonino Gandolfo who took up the theme in his depictions of urban poverty in the city of Catania on Sicily, just as Naturalism was breaking out in France, between 1880-85. Evicted, which bears the Biblical sub-title of Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, dates from 1880, and shows a woman cast out into the street, her only possessions in the bag under her left hand.

Most of Pelez’s paintings of the poor are unsettling if not frankly depressing. His Homeless from 1883 shows a worn and weary mother and her five children living on the street. She stares from sunken eyes straight at the viewer, as her children huddle in filthy blankets and sacking around her. Only the mother and her oldest daughter, who is presumably already at work, wear any shoes.

A Martyr – The Violet Vendor (1885) shows another child of the street, although here Pelez leaves doubt as to whether we are looking at the boy asleep, or dead. One of the small bunches of violets has fallen from his tray. His eyes are closed, and his mouth agape.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, most probably absinthe.

In 1888 Pelez progressed to Grimaces and Miseries: the Acrobats, or Les Saltimbanques, shown above in its smaller version, and below in the larger version exhibited to acclaim at the Salon. This follows the pattern of a traditional ‘ages of man’ image, in which the figures increase in stature from the start at the left edge, to the centre, then diminish again with advancing years, to the right.

Les Saltimbanques had been a successful show in the theatre fifty years earlier, and had lived on in entertainments staged in fairs around France. Contemporary performers attested to the faithfulness and accuracy of Pelez’s painting. This was featured and illustrated in the French weekly magazine l’Illustration, which also identified many of the models, who were performers in fairs and circuses.

Pelez never repeated the success of Les Saltimbanques, and in subsequent Salons faded from public view.

In the late 1880s the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread.

Better known for his many paintings of schools and children, Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy’s painting of The Night Hostel or The Soup Kitchen (1891) shows homeless women and children being fed in what appears to be almost a prison.

Pelez painted six different versions of The Little Lemon Vendor (c 1895-97), of which this is thought to have been the last. It was never shown in a Salon, despite its compelling imagery.

La Vachalcade (The Cow-valcade) (1896) is a reversal of a portrait of an affluent family by way of parody. Thirteen young revellers are taking part in a carnival procession, perhaps one of the Vachalcades that took place in Montmartre at the time. Some wear masks, others have the close-shorn hair characteristic of the poor, a measure against endemic parasites.

At the centre is a boy very similar to The Little Lemon Vendor, wearing an adult’s jacket and a huge hat. Behind him is a Pierrot character, and in the background a banner bearing the word Misère, misery. Dangling on that is a dead rat, a reference to a well-known café on the Place Pigalle. The ‘vache’ (cow) in the title refers to the French phrase manger de la vache enragée, meaning to live in poverty.