Hanging the Laundry out to Dry1875
From above, we look across a yard strung with lines of white sheets, where several women peg out washing beside a tipped-up cart and a house stands among trees at the right. More about this work
About this work
From above, we look across a yard strung with lines of white sheets, where several women peg out washing beside a tipped-up cart and a house stands among trees at the right. Beyond, faint grey touches suggest smokestacks and smoke along the horizon, placing the scene on the edge of a working town. Berthe Morisot, a founding member of the Impressionist group, painted it in 1875 with thick, rapid strokes that leave many details unresolved, catching instead the movement of air and light over an everyday task usually thought beneath the notice of art.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
We look down onto a landscape where several laundry lines have been draped mostly with white sheets or cloth to dry in a flat, grassy yard in front of a rustic house and a distant town in this horizontal painting. The scene is created entirely with thick, visible brushstrokes that creates a sense of texture on the canvas’s surface and makes many details difficult to make out. The forms of at least three women wearing skirts hang laundry out along the lines, and a person wearing trousers tends to a flat piece of green ground near the lower left corner. A few pieces of white cloth have been draped over the wooden fence that runs along the bottom edge of the canvas. A dove-gray cart with wooden carriage wheels rests, tipped forward, at the center of the laundry lines. To our right and just beyond the laundry lines, a two-story ivory and slate-blue house with a gray peaked roof sits behind a grove of emerald-green trees. The laundry field and the grassy plane beyond is painted with a pale celery green with long, horizontal strokes. Dabs of moss green and a white streak interrupt the field in the distance. Beyond that, touches of steel and silvery-gray paint suggest smokestacks and smoke in a town along the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up this composition. A few patches of vivid blue sky peek through a screen of shell-pink and cream-white clouds above. The artist signed the work in brick-red paint in the lower left corner, “Berthe Morisot.”
Description from the National Gallery of Art.
How it was made
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Berthe Morisot
French, 1841–1895 · Born in Bourges; died in Paris.
Morisot studied with Corot and was a founding member of the Impressionist group, exhibiting in seven of its eight exhibitions. Barred as a woman from much of public life, she painted the world open to her: mothers and children, women at their toilette, gardens and interiors, with brushwork among the freest of the movement. She married Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard, and their daughter Julie appears in many of her later works.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Impressionism
Painters in 1870s Paris who worked quickly, often outdoors, to catch light as it changed.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The National Gallery of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1985.64.28
- Credit
- Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Type
- Painting
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Berthe Morisot
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