洗濯女

For most of his working life Daumier was known not as a painter but as a printmaker, turning out thousands of biting lithographs for the Paris papers. This small panel comes from around 1863, and its subject was right outside his window. His studio stood on the Quai d'Anjou, on the Ile Saint-Louis, and below it laundry boats were moored along the Seine. Every day washerwomen climbed the stone steps up from the river, bent under bundles of wet linen. Here one of them steadies a small child on the high steps, the little girl already holding a wooden beater of her own. Daumier gives them no charm or prettiness, only weight and effort, the heavy dark figure set against the pale light coming off the water behind them.