Cleveland Museum of Art

At the Fortifications, Porte de Versailles

Auguste Louis Lepère

Date

1898

Medium

etching

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Paris underwent a dramatic redesign beginning in the mid-1800s, resulting in its distinctive appearance today but also in the displacement of residents who worked—but could not afford to live—in the city. In this print, Auguste Lepère presented the “zone,” an area on Paris’s periphery where its most economically disadvantaged and disenfranchised inhabitants lived, including some laundresses. Lepère’s image features a laundry line as the singular domestic touch within an otherwise surreal landscape, part of the city but seemingly rural. The inhabitants of the zone used open land to construct makeshift homes without modern amenities, so that they could subsist on the low wages offered by their urban employment.

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