Getty Museum

A quick drawing of Laundress with Rear Puff and also some doodles of her with Archangel Gabriel, since I left this au abandoned for some months. Laundress is way more defensive than The Princess when it comes to interact with an angelic/demonic being, even if that being didn't mean any harm to begin with...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s model for The Laundress was Nini Lopez, whom he painted regularly between 1874 and 1880 in his scenes of modern life. He made this canvas shortly after completing the illustrations for Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drunkard), a gritty novel about the downfall of a laundress in the brutal and degrading world of working-class Paris. Unlike those illustrations , this painting lacks any portrayal of backbreaking labor or social oppression. Renoir chose instead to visually reference the 19th-century stereotype of laundresses being promiscuous, signaled in this and other contemporary depictions of such figures by the sleeve slipping off the shoulder. This young woman appears artfully disheveled and rosy-cheeked as she tends to the laundry in her affluent employer’s home, standing next to a basket of linens and a stove used to heat irons.

George Hendrik Breitner (Dutch,1857-1923)

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." - Edgar Degas He made us see her. Not a laundress - the weight of laundering. That right arm pressing the dark iron down, knuckles white beneath pastel dust. The left hand splayed flat on rumpled cloth, fingers gripping fabric the way exhaustion grips the spine. Her mouth falls open - not speech, not song, just breath. The slow, animal exhale of a body doing what it must. Degas drew this woman in 1869 on brown paper that he let show through everywhere: the warm terracotta ground breathing beneath her skin, behind her shoulders, through the chalk-white of her blouse. He didn't paint a background because there is no background. There is only her. The cobalt blue of her skirt is the single note of saturation in the whole composition. Everything else dissolves into ocher and dust and the faint gleam of sweat-lit skin where the light from the left catches her collarbone. That tiny earring - barely a flick of the pastel stick - is the one concession to vanity in a life stripped to repetition. She looks up and to the right. Not at us. Past us. Past everything. Degas said art is what you make others see. Here, he made us feel the heat of the iron without painting the steam. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com

POV: The Laundress takes a break...

Pixel art of "The Laundress" (Oleksandr Murashko, 1914)