The Laundress (1888): Art, History and Details

The Laundress (1888) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901).

The work and its context

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

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec produced this drawing to illustrate an article about Parisian summers. It presents the type of poorly paid worker who remained in the city while others traveled to escape the urban heat. Because the image was to be reproduced in black and white, Toulouse-Lautrec thinned and brushed ink, scraping into it to expose fine white highlights. Like several artworks in Cleveland’s collection, the drawing was formerly owned by Roger Marx, a French collector, curator, and art critic who built perhaps the most substantial holdings of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work around the turn of the century.

Object facts

• Title: The Laundress
• Date: 1888
• Creator attribution: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black and gray wash with white paint, scratched away in places, on gray cardboard prepared with white ground
• Dimensions: Sheet: 75.9 x 63.1 cm (29 7/8 x 24 13/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1952.113

A detail from the museum

To create this drawing, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted a board white and then both scraped the material away in areas and drew with black ink to create a variety of tones throughout the image.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Michelet, Émile. “L’Été à Paris.” Paris illustré 6 (1888).
• Catalogue des tableaux, pastels, dessins, aquarelles [. . .] faisant partie de la collection Roger Marx. Paris: Galerie Manzi-Joyant, 1914.
• Astre, Achille. H. de Toulouse-Lautrec. Paris: Nilsson, 1926.

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.