At the Fortifications, Porte de Versailles (1898): Art, History and Details

At the Fortifications, Porte de Versailles (1898) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Auguste Louis Lepère (French, 1849–1918).

The work and its context

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

Paris underwent a dramatic redesign beginning in the mid-1800s, resulting in its distinctive appearance today but also in the displacement of residents who worked—but could not afford to live—in the city. In this print, Auguste Lepère presented the “zone,” an area on Paris’s periphery where its most economically disadvantaged and disenfranchised inhabitants lived, including some laundresses. Lepère’s image features a laundry line as the singular domestic touch within an otherwise surreal landscape, part of the city but seemingly rural. The inhabitants of the zone used open land to construct makeshift homes without modern amenities, so that they could subsist on the low wages offered by their urban employment.

Object facts

• Title: At the Fortifications, Porte de Versailles
• Date: 1898
• Creator attribution: Auguste Louis Lepère (French, 1849–1918)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching
• Dimensions: Image: 11.9 x 23.4 cm (4 11/16 x 9 3/16 in.); Plate: 15 x 25.9 cm (5 7/8 x 10 3/16 in.); Sheet: 19 x 28.8 cm (7 1/2 x 11 5/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1920.635

Collection credit

Gift of Ralph King

Further reading listed by the museum

• Salsbury, Britany. Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

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.