The Laundry Boat on the Seine at Asnières

In 1880 there were still 64 floating laundries on the rivers around Paris, 23 of them inside the city. These bateaux-lavoirs were moored along the Seine like houseboats. Washerwomen paid for a place in a low gallery at the waterline and rinsed linen in the running river, while the upper storey, open to the air on every side, served as a drying loft where the wet washing was spread out. That long upper floor is what fills most of this little canvas. This particular boat belonged to a man named Lebreton and was moored near the Pont de Clichy, at Asnières. Van Gogh painted it in the summer of 1887, on a canvas not much bigger than a sheet of writing paper. The painter Paul Signac, who also worked along this stretch of river, had painted the same laundry boat two years before him.