Cleveland Museum of Art

The Laundresses

Edgar DegasLinkedCulture matchlcp-568c79847d76

Date: 1879–80
Medium: etching and aquatint
Culture: France, 19th century
Department: Prints
Institution: Cleveland Museum of Art
Object ID: 393049

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

The Impressionist artist Edgar Degas explored etching briefly, from about 1875 through 1880. Created during this period, The Laundresses depicts several young women working at a Parisian laundry shop, hanging washed clothing and ironing. It is Degas’s only intaglio print that focused on laundresses, a popular subject in contemporary novels. Through the women’s hunched postures and the scale of the laundry pile at lower right, the artist emphasized the difficulty of such work. In addition to the needle traditionally used in etching, Edgar Degas employed unorthodox tools including a wire brush and a double-pointed steel accountant’s pen to make marks on the plate used for this print.

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line: Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund
Provenance: 1880-1918: Studio of the artist, Paris | 1918: (his sale, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Paris, November 22-23, 1918, no. 95) | 1973: (sale, Kornfeld and Klipstein, Bern, Switzerland, June 20, 1973, no. 161) | by 1983-?: (Artemis Group/David Carritt Limited, London) | after 1983-2020: Josefowitz Collection, Lausanne, Switzerland, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH | 2020-: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH