The Laundress

L'Assommoir appeared as a book in 1877 and gave Zola his first real commercial success. Its heroine is a Paris laundress ruined by drink. The next year the publishers Marpon and Flammarion issued an illustrated edition with 62 plates by ten artists, four of them by Renoir, and scholars now date this canvas to those same months. His plates for the book left out the novel's violence, and so does this figure. The model was Nini Lopez, a young woman from Montmartre who sat for Renoir regularly between 1874 and 1880. Her face is loosened into brushwork until she reads as a Parisian type rather than a portrait. The laundress is a subject he seems to have taken up this once and then dropped.