The Laundresses (1879–80): Art, History and Details

The Laundresses (1879–80) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: The Laundresses
• Date: 1879–80
• Creator attribution: Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching and aquatint
• Dimensions: 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.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2020.223

A detail from the museum

In addition to the needle traditionally used in etching, Edgar Degas employed unorthodox tools including a wire brush and a double-pointed steel accountant’s pen to make marks on the plate used for this print.

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue des eaux-fortes, vernis-mous, aquatintes, lithographies et monotypes par Edgar Degas et provenant de son atelier. Paris: Galerie Manzi-Joyant, 1918.
• Delteil, Loys. Le Peintre-Graveur Illustré. Vol. 9. Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1919
• Edgar Degas: 1834-1917. Exh. Cat. London: David Carritt Ltd., 1983.

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.