1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Laundress is a 1888 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A woman in a striped apron bends over a washtub, steam rising in the dim room. The lines are quick and scratchy, like the artist drew it in a hurry. This wasn’t just a sketch—Toulouse-Lautrec made it for a magazine article about Paris in summer. The city was empty, but workers like her stayed behind. He scraped into the ink to make the light catch the wet fabric, a trick for black-and-white printing. If you like how he shows everyday people, look up *impasto*—a technique where paint (or ink) is laid on thick, almost like clay.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec produced this drawing to illustrate an article about Parisian summers. It presents the type of poorly paid worker who remained in the city while others traveled to escape the urban heat. Because the image was to be reproduced in black and white, Toulouse-Lautrec thinned and brushed ink, scraping into it to expose fine white highlights. Like several artworks in Cleveland’s collection, the drawing was formerly owned by Roger Marx, a French collector, curator, and art critic who built perhaps the most substantial holdings of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work around the turn of…
To create this drawing, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted a board white and then both scraped the material away in areas and drew with black ink to create a variety of tones throughout the image.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901), known as Toulouse-Lautrec (French: ), was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator.
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