Laundry

Laundry, painted in 1875, depicts a laundress hanging sheets in a garden — a subject drawn from the working-class domestic world that Manet observed from his Montmartre studio. The painting belongs to the period when Impressionist influence brought lighter color and more open brushwork to his palette, and the white sheets drying in sunlight gave him the opportunity to work with the full luminosity of outdoor light. The Barnes Foundation holds this canvas within its exceptional collection of French painting, where it sits alongside works by Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir that collectively document the transformation of French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Manet applied paint in broad, confident strokes with notably lighter, more Impressionist handling than his earlier work — the white sheets rendered in varied passages of cream, grey-blue, and pure white that capture the effect of sunlight and shadow on laundered fabric. His palette is high-keyed and luminous, closer to Monet's outdoor canvases than to his own typical tonal approach, demonstrating the influence of his Argenteuil summers.