About this work
Two women fill a close, warm interior, their bodies telling the whole story before a word is read. On the right, a flushed worker bends forward — head tucked in, arms straining, using all her strength to press down a heavy iron.
On the left, a woman in a simple white shirt yawns openly, her fatigue evident, clutching a bottle in her hand.
Between them, a pile of ironed and starched shirts, and hanging laundry looming as a backdrop — both opportunities for Degas to experiment with subtle shades of white.
The palette is blue-dominated, accented with touches of white, green, brown, and pink.
Degas concentrated on the women's gestures to catch fleeting, everyday movements in a representation that is neither heroic nor caricatured, laying oil paint directly on an unprepared, coarse canvas — the brown linen visible under the paint in places, giving a thick, rough texture that makes the pastel colours vibrate.
Around 1884–1886, Degas dwelled heavily on the subject, depicting two women together in a laundry. There are four variations of an almost identical composition in this series, with one figure yawning and the other leaning on her iron; the canvas in the Musée d'Orsay is the third variation.
Laundry was big business in nineteenth-century Paris, employing roughly twenty-five percent of the female workforce, and steamy storefronts open to the sidewalk gave passersby a glimpse of bare-armed women at work — a world that fascinated Degas, born into an aristocratic family, with its increasingly porous distinctions between private and public life.
The choice of subject echoed the naturalist and social concerns of the artist's contemporaries: Zola's novel *L'Assommoir*, published in 1877, describes a laundress's world and gives a blunt account of the miserable lot of the Parisian poor.
The subject and its treatment later impressed a young Pablo Picasso in his Blue Period, who took up the theme in his own often pathetic mode.
As wall art, *Women Ironing* commands a room without demanding ceremony. Its muted, earthy warmth suits natural light — a linen-walled study, a reading room, a kitchen with some age to it. Probably begun in the 1870s and reworked about a decade later, the picture suggests the brutalizing effects of hard labor, yet the peculiar delicacy of Degas's touch — mimicking, in the flesh tones, his own work in pastels — reminds the viewer of the laundresses'
