Washerwomen

Washerwomen, painted on panel in 1874 and held at the Clark Art Institute, places Boldini within the broad nineteenth-century tradition of depicting laundry work — one of the most physically demanding and socially invisible forms of female labour. From Daumier to Degas, the washerwoman was a subject that permitted painters to engage with working-class women's bodies, their labour, and the social conditions of urban and semi-urban life. Boldini's treatment — on a small panel in 1874, the year following his cluster of street scene and café subjects — suggests this is part of the same comprehensive survey of French everyday life he was conducting in his early Paris years. The subject's popularity in French genre painting was not simply humanitarian: washerwomen provided legitimate opportunities to observe women in physical labour, with loosened hair and dampened clothing, in ways that more formal social subjects would not permit. The Clark Art Institute's holding of multiple Boldini works indicates the institution's sustained interest in this aspect of late nineteenth-century European painting.

The panel supports a rapid, observational handling appropriate to the subject's physical energy — washerwomen were not stationary subjects. Boldini uses directional strokes to suggest the pushing and pulling motions of the labour, the weight of wet laundry, and the steam-dampened atmosphere of a washing environment. The figures' forms are observed rather than idealised, their working postures anatomically specific.