Degas and the Laundress:
Women, Work, and Impressionism
Cleveland Museum of Art
October 8, 2023 –January 14, 2024
Woman Ironing, begun c. 1876, completed c. 1887.
Oil on canvas; 99 x 82.5 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1972.74.1
The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery. The first exhibition to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, the groundbreaking show includes the largest selection of these works seen together to date, only in Cleveland. The artworks from this series—revolutionary in their emphasis on women’s work, the strenuousness of such labor, and social class—were featured in Edgar Degas’s most significant exhibitions, where they were praised by critics as epitomizing modernity. The nearly 100 works exhibited from over 30 European and American collections reveal that depictions of laundresses by the artist and his contemporaries featured some of the most striking formal innovations of the time.
“Degas carried out some of the most striking experimentation of his long career throughout his laundress series,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings. “The subject fascinated him beginning as a young man in the 1850s and continuing until his final decade of work as an artist. The images that he created of these women are fascinating for their emphasis on labor itself rather than the stereotypes that persisted about them throughout popular culture. The women who undertook work ironing and washing often did so because they lacked other options, and they endured tremendously difficult working conditions.”
A visible presence in the city, ironing in shops open to the street or carrying heavy baskets of clothing, laundresses undertook some of the most difficult and poorly paid labor at the time, leading some in the industry to supplement their income through sex work. The depictions of these women featured in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism provide a surprising contrast to more familiar Impressionist representations of upper-middle-class leisure.
The Laundre [La Blanchisseuse]ss, 1877–79.
Oil on canvas; 80.8 x 56.6 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago,
Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.102
Woman Ironing, 1892
Oil on board; 21.4 x 25.4 cm.
The Cleveland Museum of Art,
Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.119
The Little Laundress, from Album des peintres-graveurs, 1896.
Color lithograph on China paper; image: 29 x 19.7 cm; sheet: 45.4 x 33.7 cm.
The Cleveland Museum of Art,
Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.151
Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism contextualizes Edgar Degas’s laundress series with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries—including Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard—as well as painters that Edgar Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. It also presents ephemera, such as posters, photographs, and books, that reveals the widespread interest that Parisians of all social classes had in the topic of laundresses during the late 1800s.
“The extraordinary works assembled for this exhibition reveal a new and exciting aspect of an otherwise well-known art historical movement,” said William Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exceptional holdings of 19th-century French art situate us to present such an inventive exhibition, and we look forward to sharing works of impressive quality—from Degas’s private sketchbooks to some of his most celebrated canvases alongside those by his colleagues—that have never before been seen together.”
Women, Work, and Impressionism
Exhibition Catalogue
Britany Salsbury ed.
Published by The Cleveland Museum of Art
ISBN: 978-0-300-27322-9
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring thematic essays by scholars of art history, French studies, literature, and history. The 256-page catalogue is the first publication to examine and document Edgar Degas’s portrayals of Parisian laundresses. Edited by Britany Salsbury with contributions by Aleksandra Bursac, Michelle Foa, Gretchen Schultz, Charles Sowerwine, Richard Thomson, and Claire White.
CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106