Washerwomen

Washerwomen (1888) at the Museum of Modern Art was painted during Gauguin's two months at the Yellow House in Arles with Van Gogh — one of the most documented and analyzed collaborations in the history of art. Both painters made works from the observation of working-class Arlésiennes and the landscape around Arles during this period, and comparison of their treatments reveals everything about the difference between their approaches. Van Gogh's Arles washerwoman subjects are charged with empathy and optical intensity; Gauguin's are cool, formally organized, psychologically withdrawn. He was more interested in the compositional possibilities of figures along a canal bank than in the social reality of women doing laundry, and his rendering of the reflections in the water demonstrates the formal analysis he applied to all his subjects regardless of their human content. MoMA's possession of this canvas as a document of the Yellow House period makes it one of the most historically resonant of its Post-Impressionist holdings.

The washerwomen are rendered with Gauguin's characteristic economy — simplified figures arranged along the canal bank, their reflections in the water described with minimal but effective strokes. The overall tonality is cooler and more controlled than Van Gogh's intensely saturated Arles palette. The composition is horizontal and calm, demonstrating Gauguin's more intellectual approach to the landscape subjects they shared.