Стирка

Manet painted this washerwoman and the small child beside her outdoors, in a friend's garden, in 1875, chasing the flicker of real daylight across the linen and the leaves. He sent it to the Salon of 1876, and the jury rejected it. Rather than hide the snub, Manet threw open his own studio and put the picture on public view there, drawing crowds and critics through the spring. The young poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote a spirited defence of him that same season. What unsettled the jury was partly the handling, the way the whites of the washing are laid on in broad, unblended strokes so the garden light seems to move over them. Manet never joined the Impressionists' own shows, yet here he was working squarely in their open-air daylight.