The Laundress

Laundresses were among the most frequently painted working-class subjects in later nineteenth-century French painting, and the comparison between Renoir's and Degas's treatment of this theme illuminates the poles of Impressionist social vision. Degas's laundresses of the same period — particularly the series he worked on through the 1870s and 1880s — emphasised physical exhaustion, the flattening repetition of industrial labour, and the unflattering postures of women doing hard physical work. Renoir's 1877 Laundress at the Art Institute of Chicago maintains warmth and dignity throughout: the woman is shown with the same sympathetic warmth he gave his bourgeois models. The laundry trade in nineteenth-century Paris was enormous — thousands of women worked as blanchisseuses collecting, washing, and delivering the linens of the bourgeoisie — and its association with both working-class femininity and the intimacy of domestic life made it a recurrent subject for painters who wanted to document modern social reality. Renoir's treatment avoids both Degas's astringent observation and the sentimentalized peasant tradition inherited from Millet, instead positioning the laundress within his characteristic warmth of feeling without suppressing her specificity as a working woman.

The laundress's figure is treated with the same warm colour sense as Renoir's bourgeois subjects, her working clothes painted in creams and blues without condescension. Physical effort is implied by posture rather than described through distorted anatomy. The background — steam, or a domestic interior — is handled loosely, keeping the focus on the figure.