The laundry Bazincourt

The Laundry, Bazincourt at the Musée d'Orsay, painted in 1900, shows the outdoor laundry facility in the village adjacent to Éragny where Pissarro had lived for sixteen years. The outdoor wash house — common in French villages before domestic plumbing — was a site of collective women's labour where the practical necessity of washing clothes on a regular schedule brought the community together. Pissarro had been painting working women in laundry subjects since the 1870s, and this late canvas revisits the subject with the assured freedom of his final manner: warm colour, loose handling, the specific quality of outdoor light on water and wet cloth. The Orsay's holding of this Bazincourt laundry alongside the broader survey of his career allows this late rural labour subject to be read as part of a sustained engagement with women's working lives that extended from his early Pontoise washerwoman studies through to these final Norman subjects.

Pissarro renders the laundry scene with his mature handling — the women at their washing and the specific quality of the light on the water and on the working figures depicted with his characteristic broken color technique. His handling of the reflective water and the figures' movements creates the specific visual character of the washing scene. The social observation of the communal female labor is integrated within the formal investigation of light and atmospheric color that was his consistent concern.