Las planchadoras

One woman leans her whole weight down onto the iron. The other has stopped, thrown her head back and opened her mouth in a wide yawn, one hand reaching for the bottle beside her. Degas painted laundresses for more than 20 years, and by the 1880s the trade was a familiar part of working Paris, hot, badly paid, done by women in steam-filled shops. Writers like Emile Zola were putting exactly these people into their novels just then, and Degas shared their flat, unsentimental eye. He made four almost identical versions of this pair, and the one in the Musee d'Orsay is the third. Nothing is dramatised. He simply watched two tired workers long enough to catch the exact moment one of them stops to stretch and yawn.