Stairway of the Washerwomen

In August 1794, a week after the fall of Robespierre, Hubert Robert was let out of prison, where he had spent some ten months of the Terror. This picture is dated 1796. He wrote his name and the year on the wall at the lower right.

The setting is Paris. During his 11 years in Italy as a young man, Robert had worked out a favourite arrangement, a great arch filled with light, with buildings crowded around it. Here he brings that Roman device home. A stairway leads down to the water, where washerwomen are at work. Laundry was one of the commonest trades on the Seine, done by women at the river's edge or on moored washing boats.

He painted it in oil on paper, later mounted on canvas. The museum suggests that the paper, the loose brushwork and the attention to passing light mean it may have been painted outdoors, a way of working more and more artists were taking up. A picture called The Washerwomen, of almost the same size, was sold in Paris in 1885 and may be this one. The collector Forsyth Wickes bought it from the dealers Wildenstein in New York in 1930, and it came to the museum with his bequest.