Volpini Suite: Laundresses (Les Laveuses) (1889): Art, History and Details

Volpini Suite: Laundresses (Les Laveuses) (1889) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903).

The work and its context

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

Gauguin discovered an exotic, primitive culture in Brittany, a rugged region on the Atlantic coast in northwestern France. He then sought to translate into expressive forms the picturesque costumes, customs, and special spirituality of the peasants. The unusual point of view, the stylization of the frothing water, and the cropped cow at the lower left all betray the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which became popular in France from the early 1860s. The twelve lithographs in this set, printed from zinc plates rather than stones, were Gauguin's first attempts at printmaking. To heighten the decorative effect, the lithographs were printed onto large sheets of bright yellow paper.

Object facts

• Title: Volpini Suite: Laundresses (Les Laveuses)
• Date: 1889
• Creator attribution: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: zincograph
• Dimensions: Sheet: 50 x 64.9 cm (19 11/16 x 25 9/16 in.); Image: 20.8 x 26 cm (8 3/16 x 10 1/4 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1954.55.6

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lemonedes, Heather, Paul Gauguin, Belinda Thomson, Agnieszka Juszczak, Chris Stolwijk, and Moyna Stanton. Paul Gauguin: the breakthrough into modernity. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

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.