The Laundress

The Laundress by Honore Daumier

This is one of my favorite paintings. The description below is from the Muse d'Orsay website. I think it must have been painted by Daumier on a good day. For an instant the darker world of toil that surrounds the mother and child falls away, and they enjoy the momentary triumph of ascending the stairs. 

I'm trying to find a biography of Daumier. I'd like to learn more about him. Another version of the laundress, called The Burden, is a painting that is brutally sad. The mother carries her burden of washing and her child clings to her skirt. The mother's body is weighed down, the force she is straining against is on the side her child clings to. It is a powerful painting.

There are three similar versions on the theme of the laundress, the first of which appeared in the Salon in 1861. At a time when Millet was turning his back on folklore and taking a fresh look at the peasant world in the 1850s, this painting offered a similar analysis of the plight of city workers. Stripped of the playful, gracious air that Boucher, Fragonard or Hubert Robert gave their washerwomen in the 18th century, Daumier's Laundress epitomises a social type characterised by gruelling repetitive toil.

The attention given to the figures reveals the toll it took on souls and bodies. There is a mixture of resignation and tenderness in the mother helping her child climb the high steps. Clutching a beater in her hand, the little girl seems destined to carry on her mother's task.

The houses along the quay in Paris in the background provide a luminous setting, no doubt precisely observed, but left unfinished to give the scene a powerful symbolic dimension.