Women Ironing

In the Paris of the 1880s, laundry was big business. Washing and pressing the city's linen employed something like a quarter of its working women, and the laundress had become a familiar figure in novels and on the street, associated with long hours and cheap wine. Degas returned to these women again and again, more than 40 times. Here two of them share a small workshop. One leans the whole weight of her body onto the iron to force the crease into a starched shirt. The other has stopped, mid-yawn, one hand at her throat and the other around a bottle. Degas painted this same pair several times over, in versions so alike they are hard to tell apart; he began the idea in the 1870s and reworked it about a decade later.