Young Woman Ironing

In Paris around 1800, linen was washed and pressed by hand, by women paid for the work, and Boilly paints one of them at her table with the care of an inventory. The museum points to the details. There is a water carafe, a glazed ceramic pitcher, and a brazier glowing with coals, which is how the irons were heated. An iron of the time was a solid block of metal with no heat of its own, so the work went back and forth between the fire and the cloth.

Boilly learned this kind of small, exact picture of daily life from Dutch painters of the 17th century. He signed it at lower right, with the L and the B of his name joined together.

Its first owners are uncertain. According to Sotheby's, it may have been bought in Paris by the Basel collector Nikolaus Reber-Passavant for the Burckhardt family, and it stayed with their descendants in Basel until a sale in London in 1981. The museum bought it two years later.