The Bleaching Ground

Before chemical bleach, you whitened linen by soaking it and laying it out on grass for the sun and dew to do the work over weeks. Liebermann painted that old routine in 1882 in the Dutch village of Zweeloo, where two maids spread washing across a shaded lawn while chickens peck and neighbours talk over a fence. He was a young German drawn to plain rural labour, the kind of subject Millet had made serious in France a generation earlier. Liebermann kept altering the picture: he painted out a large kneeling laundress in the foreground and trimmed about 20 centimeters off the bottom, which stretched the composition wide and low. What is left is mostly green, the even light coming down through the fruit trees onto cloth laid out to catch it.