The Washerwoman

The Louvre dates this small panel to 1849, the year after the revolution of 1848 and the year Millet took his family out of Paris to Barbizon, at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, with cholera in the city behind them. It is painted on wood, 44 centimetres high, and shows a woman at the tub lifting the pot to pour hot lye over the linen. The great wash was not a weekly chore in a French household then. It came round a few times a year, ran for two or three days, and was the heaviest work done indoors. Georges Thomy Thiéry, a collector who bought the Barbizon painters once they had become expensive, left the panel to the Louvre in 1902.