La Blanchisseuse

Painted in 1895, the year Vallotton was at the height of his graphic activity and the period of his closest engagement with the Nabis, 'La Blanchisseuse' (The Laundress) depicts a working-class woman in the act of washing or pressing laundry — a subject with a long tradition in French art from Daumier and Manet to Degas. The laundress occupied a specific social position in late nineteenth-century Paris: she was a working woman, often from the popular classes, whose labour maintained the cleanliness of bourgeois linen. By 1895 the subject had accumulated social and political resonance through the Impressionist and realist tradition, and Vallotton's version brings his own coolly schematic vision to this charge. Unlike Degas's laundresses, who are shown in physical exhaustion or in the atmospheric heat of the ironing room, Vallotton's figure is rendered with the same emotional restraint he applied to all subjects.

Oil on canvas using Vallotton's emerging mature technique: simplified forms, smooth paint surfaces, and a tonal organisation that emphasises the flat planes of the working woman's body and clothing rather than the atmospheric depth of the setting. The handling is moving away from the sketchier approach of his early career toward the precise, contained method of his mature work.