Washerwomen

When the paintings left in Millet's studio were auctioned in Paris in May 1875, a few months after his death, one of the bidders was acting for Martin Brimmer of Boston. Brimmer was the first president of the city's Museum of Fine Arts, which had been founded in 1870 and had not yet opened its doors, and he came away with this canvas. It is evening on a wide, still river. On the bank two women are heaving a load of wet washing onto one of their backs, their figures dark against a sky gone pale and rosy, and a thin crescent moon hangs at the upper left. Out on the water a man poles a flat boat, and small cattle move along the far bank. Millet painted it in the mid-1850s. It stayed in the Brimmer house after Martin's death in 1896, and his widow, Marianne, left it to the museum in 1906.