Woman ironing

Paris in 1869 ran on laundresses. Tens of thousands of women worked in the wash-houses and ironing shops, and because those shops opened straight onto the street, anyone walking past could stand and watch them work. It was one of the worst paid trades in the city, and in the popular press the laundress carried a reputation for being sexually available, which is part of why she turns up so often in the painting and the novels of those years. Zola built L'Assommoir around one of them a few years later. Degas went back to ironers for the next 30 years, in oil, in pastel, singly and in pairs. Here the woman leans her weight down onto the iron, the linen takes up most of the canvas, and the room behind her is left as a blur.