Les lavandières
Alfred Sisley·1876
Historical Context
Les lavandières — the washerwomen — painted in 1876, shows Sisley incorporating working-class labour into his Marly-period Seine scenes. The laundresses who washed linen in the river were a habitual figure in French rural and suburban life, and their presence on the riverbank gave Impressionist painters a human element that activated the landscape without requiring the compositional and social complexity of bourgeois leisure scenes. Sisley's treatment of the washerwomen — figures absorbed into the riverside rather than portrayed as subjects — is consistent with his tendency to treat human presence as one element among the landscape's many components.
Technical Analysis
Oil on canvas. The riverbank setting combines the reflective water surface with the figures at the water's edge — a conjunction that allows the painter to move between the animate human forms and the more fluid, atmospheric surface of the river. Sisley renders the figures with sufficient definition to read as working women without individualising them.
