Washerwomen at the Laïta

The Laïta is a short tidal river in southern Brittany. It marks the boundary between the departments of Finistère and Morbihan. It meets the sea at Le Pouldu, the coastal hamlet where Sérusier had painted in 1889 and 1890 and where he was at work again in 1892. Two women are leaving its bank with laundry they have just taken out of the water, heavy white linen slung over one shoulder. The nearer one wears a dark hood, the other a white coiffe, and both lean forward under the load. Behind them the hills are cut into flat fields of red, orange and ochre, edged by dark hedges that run across the slope like lines on a map. The water is one grey-blue sheet with a few reeds at its edge. On the sandy bank, clumps of grass sit like small cushions.