A Woman Ironing
Edgar Degas·1873
Historical Context
A Woman Ironing is among the most iconic of Degas's images of Parisian working-class women, showing a laundress bent over her iron in the posture of sustained physical labour. Degas produced several versions of this subject in the 1880s, drawn to the ironing woman as a motif that combined formal interest — the diagonal thrust of arms and iron across the canvas — with social observation of unglamorous female labour. The subject places Degas alongside Zola and the Naturalist writers in their attention to the conditions of working women's lives, though Degas's approach is aesthetic rather than polemical.
Technical Analysis
The woman's body is compressed by the picture plane, her arms creating a strong diagonal that communicates the effort of pressing. Degas applies paint loosely in the background, contrasting with slightly more resolved treatment of the figure, particularly the face showing the physical strain of the labour.
