1880
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Laundresses is a 1880 by Edgar Degas, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see three women in a cramped laundry room, ironing and hanging wet clothes. Their backs are bent, arms moving fast. Degas made this as a print—scratching the image into metal, then pressing ink onto paper. It’s his only print about laundresses, a job Parisian writers often wrote about. The huge pile of laundry in the corner makes the work feel endless. Look up *impasto* to see how other artists built up paint like Degas built up ink.
The Impressionist artist Edgar Degas explored etching briefly, from about 1875 through 1880. Created during this period, The Laundresses depicts several young women working at a Parisian laundry shop, hanging washed clothing and ironing. It is Degas’s only intaglio print that focused on laundresses, a popular subject in contemporary novels. Through the women’s hunched postures and the scale of the laundry pile at lower right, the artist emphasized the difficulty of such work.
In addition to the needle traditionally used in etching, Edgar Degas employed unorthodox tools including a wire brush and a double-pointed steel accountant’s pen to make marks on the plate used for this print.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas on 19 July 1834 in Paris, Edgar Degas came from an affluent banking family with aristocratic roots and spent his childhood among the cultivated circles of the French capital.
See the richer artist page
