The Laundresses

The Laundresses at the Saint Louis Art Museum dates from Fragonard's early period around 1758, showing him engaging with the Dutch and Flemish tradition of domestic labor subjects that he had absorbed through Paris collections and through his formation under Chardin. While Fragonard is best known for his aristocratic fêtes galantes and erotic scenes, he also produced genre scenes of working women that demonstrated his range and his engagement with the broader tradition of European genre painting. The laundress was a common subject in both Dutch and French genre painting, combining domestic virtue with physical labor in images that were simultaneously socially observant and visually appealing. Fragonard's handling of light effects on laundry and steam, and his warm tonality derived from Dutch masters, gave these labor scenes a quality quite different from his more celebrated aristocratic subjects. The Saint Louis Art Museum holds this as an example of the range that Fragonard's early work encompassed before his most characteristic Rococo subjects dominated his output.

The warm tonality and carefully observed light effects on the laundry scene show Fragonard's debt to Dutch genre painting. The composition balances the working figures against the surrounding domestic environment.