1894
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Laundress: La Blanchisseuse de la place Dauphine is a 1894 by James McNeill Whistler, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A woman in a white apron leans in a doorway, her arms crossed. Behind her, two more laundresses scrub clothes in a steamy room. The scene is quiet, almost like a snapshot. Whistler lived in Paris for years, but he wasn’t French. He was American, and he loved how ordinary city life looked—especially these small shops. Laundry work was common then, but few artists painted it this simply. For more scenes of everyday work, look up Edgar Degas.
This print is one of several in which James McNeill Whistler depicted a laundry shop on Paris’s historic place Dauphine, near Notre Dame cathedral. As an American expatriate, Whistler was fascinated by the city’s storefronts and recorded them often. Here, he presents a scene that captivated many urban dwellers at the time: laundresses are seen through a doorway, their sleeves pushed up for work. The subject reflects a practice that Edgar Degas himself favored and which had become recognizable in his work, described by an early biographer as “strolling in the shadow of Paris’s streets,…
Read the full account in the museum source.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter in oils and watercolor, and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom.
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