A Woman's Work (1912): Art, History and Details

A Woman's Work (1912) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Sloan (American, 1871–1951).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Trained as a journalist, the young Sloan explored social issues more vigorously than most of the painters of his time, portraying working-class urbanites engaged in ordinary activities. He observed this particular scene through a rear window of his Manhattan apartment. Perched on a narrow fire escape, a woman hangs fresh laundry to dry on clotheslines strung between tenements. As evidenced by the painting, the labors of American women at the turn of the 1900s were most often confined to the domestic realm.

Object facts

• Title: A Woman's Work
• Date: 1912
• Creator attribution: John Sloan (American, 1871–1951)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 97.2 x 82.2 x 6.4 cm (38 1/4 x 32 3/8 x 2 1/2 in.); Unframed: 80.3 x 65.4 cm (31 5/8 x 25 3/4 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1964.160

A detail from the museum

According to John Sloan's diary, this painting was made in March 1912 at his apartment on East 22nd Street, New York.

Collection credit

Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White

Further reading listed by the museum

• John Butler Yeats, "John Sloan's Exhibition," The Seven Arts 2 (June 1917).
• Sloan, John. Gist of Art . New York: 1944.
• Sloan, John. John Sloan. New York, NY: American Artists Group, 1945.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.