Edgar Degas - Woman Ironing [c.1876-87]

Edgar Degas - Woman Ironing [c.1876-87], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Women at work provided inspiration for Degas. In addition to ballet dancers and cabaret singers, he also painted milliners and dressmakers, laundresses and ironers - such as the young woman here. Laundresses also appeared as characters in newly popular realistic novels, which detailed the difficult lives of these women. They worked long, hot hours for low wages, and because they wore loose clothing and made deliveries to men's apartments, their morals were often questioned. Degas, however, seems not to have been interested in their social situation so much as in their characteristic gestures - in the line of his ironer's body as she leans into her work, in the soft curtain of colour provided by the garments that hang around her, in the crisp shirt folded on the table.

[Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 66 cm]