About this work
announces itself through contrast. The painting is distinguished by its dramatic chiaroscuro, with the woman silhouetted against a luminous white backdrop.
A woman stands in profile, facing left, pressing a pale blue shirt on a white work surface — the viewer seems to look slightly down onto her shoulders and onto the table, whose bright expanse dominates the lower half of the composition.
Her chestnut-brown hair is pulled into a bun, and her dress — denim-blue, speckled with white dots — catches strokes of blush pink.
She presses down on the iron with her far hand and uses the other to straighten the fabric of the shirt collar, the iron itself thick-handled with a narrow, triangular pressing surface. Behind her, a small bronze-colored bowl and a crisply starched shirt rest on the table, while a row of hanging garments in pale crepe pink, flaxen gold, teal, and lavender purple soften the light streaming through three sheer-curtained windows.
The artist's feathery brushstrokes give the whole scene a hazy, suspended quality.
The *Woman Ironing* held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington was begun around 1876 and completed around 1887 — a span that speaks to Degas's habit of reworking canvases across years. From 1869 onward, laundresses became a sustained theme alongside ballet and racing; there are 27 extant depictions of them.
Laundry was big business in nineteenth-century Paris, employing roughly twenty-five percent of the female workforce, and steamy storefronts open to the street gave passersby a glimpse of women ironing, bare-armed in the heat.
French artists had largely overlooked this occupation as a subject for art — until Degas, and his friend the novelist Émile Zola, began to take notice.
Writer Edmond de Goncourt described visiting Degas's studio, where the artist showed him "washerwomen and still more washerwomen," explaining to him technically the downward pressing and circular strokes of the iron.
What ultimately drove Degas was not their social condition but their characteristic gestures — the line of his ironer's body as she leans into her work, the soft curtain of color from the garments hanging around her, the crisp shirt folded on the table.
On the wall, *Woman Ironing* earns its place in rooms that can hold a quiet
