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The Laundresses
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
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.
Cleveland Museum of Art’s own descriptionCredit lineThe Laundresses, 1879–80. Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917). Etching and aquatint; image: 11.6 x 15.7 cm (4 9/16 x 6 3/16 in.); sheet: 21 x 23.8 cm (8 1/4 x 9 3/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund, 2020.223
