The Laundress

The Laundress by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, created in 1888, is a significant drawing that exemplifies the artist’s commitment to capturing the ordinary lives of Parisian working women in late 19th-century France. This powerful piece utilizes black and gray wash, dramatically highlighted with white paint, applied to gray cardboard prepared with a white ground.

The physical application of the media is central to the work’s impact. Toulouse-Lautrec layered the wash to establish form and shadow, then built up the light areas using opaque white. Crucially, he employed a subtractive technique, scratching away the wet or dry paint in places to expose the prepared ground beneath. This method enhances the linear energy and immediacy of the figure, lending the image a raw, expressionistic quality typical of his most intimate studies.

As a crucial figure in the Post-Impressionist movement, Toulouse-Lautrec devoted his career to documenting the complex social landscape of modern life, observing the nuances of labor, performance, and leisure. His focus on figures like the laundress—a common but often overlooked subject—demonstrates his preference for gritty realism over academic idealization. This dedication to authentic depiction made his drawings and prints essential documents of the era. Though the artist's prolific output now often enters the public domain, allowing for wide access to high-quality reproductions, this original 1888 drawing offers direct insight into Toulouse-Lautrec’s mastery of line and tone. This seminal work is classified as a drawing and is held in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.