Les lavandières, Triel-sur-Seine

Triel-sur-Seine, a small town on the Seine northwest of Paris, provided Marquet with a subject that combined two of his recurring preoccupations: water and the human activity of labour. The laundresses ('lavandières') depicted here in 1931 belong to an old tradition of riverside washing that was still practiced along the Seine in the early twentieth century before industrial laundries displaced it entirely. Now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the work is among his later river compositions and shows the sustained attention he brought to the urban and suburban waterways of northern France throughout his career. The subject matter connects him to an Impressionist tradition — Daumier, Monet, and Pissarro had all represented riverside washerwomen — but Marquet's version is characteristically quieter and more geometric, the figures integrated into the compositional fabric rather than isolated as genre subjects.

The composition places working figures at the water's edge, their forms compressed within the narrow vertical space between riverbank and water surface. Marquet uses their dark garments as colour accents against the lighter tone of the river. Paint handling is loose and summary for the figures while more even in the water passages.