The Laundress: La Blanchisseuse de la place Dauphine (1894): Art, History and Details

The Laundress: La Blanchisseuse de la place Dauphine (1894) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903); Thomas Robert Way (British, 1861–1913).

The work and its context

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

This print is one of several in which James McNeill Whistler depicted a laundry shop on Paris’s historic place Dauphine, near Notre Dame cathedral. As an American expatriate, Whistler was fascinated by the city’s storefronts and recorded them often. Here, he presents a scene that captivated many urban dwellers at the time: laundresses are seen through a doorway, their sleeves pushed up for work. The subject reflects a practice that Edgar Degas himself favored and which had become recognizable in his work, described by an early biographer as “strolling in the shadow of Paris’s streets, stop[ping] . . . before the boutiques of laundresses populating his neighborhood.”

Object facts

• Title: The Laundress: La Blanchisseuse de la place Dauphine
• Date: 1894
• Creator attribution: James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903); Thomas Robert Way (British, 1861–1913)
• Culture: America
• Type: Print
• Technique: transfer lithograph
• Dimensions: Image: 23 x 15.7 cm (9 1/16 x 6 3/16 in.); Sheet: 27.5 x 20.1 cm (10 13/16 x 7 15/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1924.17

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. 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.