Wäscherinnen

Around 1870 Degas began watching the laundresses of Paris, the women who washed, wrung and pressed the city's linen in hot, damp back rooms. It was an unheroic subject that most painters ignored, plain working-class labour, and he came back to it for the rest of his life, in roughly 30 pictures. This one is tiny, barely bigger than a postcard, two women caught mid-task. Lemoisne, the scholar who catalogued Degas, even listed it under the wry title washerwomen with toothaches. The little panel was stolen from the Le Havre museum in 1973 and came back to France only decades later, recovered on the New York art market.