Le Pont Neuf
Medium
etching
Dimensions
image: 17.1 × 31 cm · sheet: 22.5 × 33.9 cm
Classification
Department
Prints
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Gift of Elizabeth Carroll Shearer in memory of Robert Lundie Shearer
Accession Number
1987.190
Tags
About this artwork
Like Charles Meryon, Auguste Lepère was known for etchings of Paris. This work shows how bateaux-lavoirs (wash boats) changed over the course of a half century, as dissatisfaction grew about their unsanitariness and unattractiveness. In contrast to Meryon’s hectic scenes—in which laundresses lean out of open windows and stretch lines of laundry along the river’s paved banks—the boats appear here as orderly and uniform structures, closed so that the women working within were not visible to passer...