Cleveland Museum of Art

The Laundress: La Blanchisseuse de la place Dauphine

James McNeill Whistler

Date

1894

Medium

transfer lithograph

Culture

America

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This print is one of several in which James McNeill Whistler depicted a laundry shop on Paris’s historic place Dauphine, near Notre Dame cathedral. As an American expatriate, Whistler was fascinated by the city’s storefronts and recorded them often. Here, he presents a scene that captivated many urban dwellers at the time: laundresses are seen through a doorway, their sleeves pushed up for work. The subject reflects a practice that Edgar Degas himself favored and which had become recognizable in his work, described by an early biographer as “strolling in the shadow of Paris’s streets, stop[ping] . . . before the boutiques of laundresses populating his neighborhood.”

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