Laundry Girls Ironing, c.1884/86 by Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas
Canvas Print - 2845-DEE
Location: Musee d'Orsay, Paris, FranceOriginal Size: 76 x 81.5 cm
Giclée Canvas Print | $72.74 USD
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*Max printing size: 36.4 x 39.8 in
*Max framing size: Long side up to 28"
"Laundry Girls Ironing" will be custom-printed for your order using the latest giclée printing technology. This technique ensures that the Canvas Print captures an exceptional level of detail, showcasing vibrant and vivid colors with remarkable clarity.
Our use of the finest quality, fine-textured canvas lends art reproductions a painting-like appearance. Combined with a satin-gloss coating, it delivers exceptional print outcomes, showcasing vivid colors, intricate details, deep blacks, and impeccable contrasts. The canvas structure is also highly compatible with canvas stretching frames, further enhancing its versatility.
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If you select a frameless art print of "Laundry Girls Ironing" by Edgar Degas, it will be prepared for shipment within 48 hours. However, if you prefer a framed artwork, the printing and framing process will typically require approximately 7-8 days before it is ready to be shipped.
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Painting Information
It is impossible to look at this painting without recalling the relentless pace of the late 19th-century city - a Paris charged by industry, by the crowds, by the smoky air of restless ambition. The two women laboring in the laundry embody this modern swirl of life, working-class figures placed firmly in the realm of Naturalist and social concerns that authors like Zola documented. Degas's vision, however, remains clear-eyed. Rather than bathos or moralizing, he offers a scene drawn from everyday gestures - intimate yet unsentimental - an approach that would resonate in later works, particularly Picasso's Blue Period.
At first glance, the composition might seem straightforward: two women, one leaning into her iron, the other caught mid-yawn, both framed against the coarse fabric and paraphernalia of their trade. Yet there's a shrewd orchestration of forms in how each figure occupies a distinctive space. The gaze travels from the open-mouthed weariness of the woman at left to the bent, dogged posture of her colleague, echoing an interplay of exhaustion and resolve. Four variations of this composition exist, each capturing similar movements and reinforcing Degas's fascination with the working body.
The color palette is critical in conveying the urgency and fatigue of the scene. Degas lays pastel pinks, oranges, and blues over an unprepared, rough canvas - a gambit that accentuates the rawness of their setting. The exposed brown linen peeks through, harnessing a textural grit that feels almost tactile. This graininess lends the surface a vibrant but subdued energy: gentle luminosity meets a more grounded earthiness. Such delicate contrasts help the image transcend mere reportage and become instead a poignant statement on everyday toils.
Key to this effect is Degas’s painting technique, which balances deliberate, graphic brushwork with areas that appear dashed off in swift strokes. The iron in hand is rendered with a certain weight, while the figures' faces and clothing shift between immediate, impressionistic marks and sharper delineations. By applying paint directly onto the coarse weave of the canvas, Degas merges subject and medium in a way that underscores the physical effort of the laundresses themselves. They are neither glorified nor mocked - only observed with a sharp yet humane eye. It is this tension between fleeting realism and careful construction that elevates the painting's understated drama.
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