The Laundresses
Medium
etching and aquatint
Dimensions
image: 11.6 × 15.7 cm · sheet: 21 × 23.8 cm
Classification
Department
Prints
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund
Accession Number
2020.223
Tags
male
About this artwork
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.