Las lavanderas de Arlés

Gauguin arrived in Arles in October 1888 and stayed nine weeks. In December, near the end of it, he bought a roll of coarse jute sacking in the town because it was cheap, and painted this on it. The women are washing at the Roubine du Roi, the canal along the edge of Arles where the town's laundresses worked. He drew them with dark outlines and filled them with flat colour, keeping almost no depth, a way of working he had brought from Brittany and was pushing harder here. He left Arles on Christmas Eve. 31 years later the painting went to Bilbao, bought at an exhibition there by the provincial council on the advice of the sculptor Paco Durrio, who had been Gauguin's friend.