Le Pont Neuf

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 passersby.