La Seine à Port-Marly, le lavoir

Pissarro painted this in 1872, a year after coming home from London, where he had waited out the Franco-Prussian War. His house at nearby Louveciennes had been used by Prussian troops, and most of the canvases he left behind were destroyed. Back on the Seine, he did not paint the river as a place of Sunday boating. He painted work. The long low sheds on the water are barges converted into public wash-houses, and the chimney smoking on the far bank belongs to the Port-Marly paper mill. On the near bank a laundress leans against a tree and looks straight out at us, as if she has just noticed she is being watched.