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The Laundress
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
1877–79
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 80.8 × 56.5 cm (31 13/16 × 22 1/4 in.); Framed: 100.4 × 79.4 × 9.6 cm (39 1/2 × 31 1/4 × 3 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s model for The Laundress was Nini Lopez, whom he painted regularly between 1874 and 1880 in his scenes of modern life. He made this canvas shortly after completing the illustrations for Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drunkard), a gritty novel about the downfall of a laundress in the brutal and degrading world of working-class Paris. Unlike those illustrations , this painting lacks any portrayal of backbreaking labor or social oppression. Renoir chose instead to visually reference the 19th-century stereotype of laundresses being promiscuous, signaled in this and other contemporary depictions of such figures by the sleeve slipping off the shoulder. This young woman appears artfully disheveled and rosy-cheeked as she tends to the laundry in her affluent employer’s home, standing next to a basket of linens and a stove used to heat irons.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
