Laundry Boat by the Banks of the Seine, near Paris

That long low structure moored at the bank is a bateau-lavoir, a floating wash-house. For generations these boats lined the Seine, and working women carried the city's laundry down to them to scrub, rinse, and wring it in the river water. Renoir painted this in the early 1870s, when he and his friends were leaving the studio to catch ordinary daylight on the water. It is an unglamorous piece of Paris river life, the kind of everyday scene the older Salon painters would have passed over. He keeps the brushwork loose and quick, more interested in the flicker of light on the current and the green of the bank than in any single detail. The laundry boats are gone now, cleared from the river as plumbing reached the houses, so the thing that gave the picture its title is the one part a viewer today would no longer recognise.