Eugène Boudin, 'Laundresses by a Stream', about 1885-90

Boudin is most famous for his scenes of well-to-do holidaymakers on the beaches of the fashionable Normandy resorts of Trouville and Deauville. He produced around 300 such pictures during his career. Three of them are in the National Gallery’s collection: Beach Scene,Trouville, is a typical example.

The artist passionately defended his efforts to paint these middle-class people at leisure, arguing that ‘they are often resting from hard toil, these men who emerge from their offices and their studies.’ But an extended stay in Brittany in 1867, when he observed the hard life of agricultural labourers, seems to have provoked a change of direction. He confided to a friend: ‘This beach at Trouville that until recently delighted me, now, on my return, seems merely a ghastly masquerade.’ From that time on, Boudin began to paint fewer beach scenes. He turned his attention to ports, harbours, fish markets and the daily life of the inhabitants of the northern French coast, including its washerwomen. In all, Boudin painted around 100 paintings that focus on laundresses. Most of them were made in Trouville, where at low tide the wives of fishermen would come to the water’s edge to do their washing. The subject was a perfect one for him, as it offered an opportunity to combine people, landscape and water.

The working-class women here occupy a different world to the seasonal visitors on Trouville beach. Ranged across the canvas in Boudin’s characteristic frieze-like arrangement, they are hard at work washing their linen in the river Touques, just inland from the resort. Although they are viewed from a closer vantage point than most of the figures in the beach scenes, like them they remain anonymous and lack individual facial features. A few broad strokes of paint capture the women’s movements as they rinse, rub and scrub the garments before hanging them out to dry on the fence behind them.

This was not the first appearance of washerwomen in French art. They can often be seen by the riverside in landscapes by Daubigny and Corot, where they are usually shown as diminutive, incidental figures. Daumier and Degas both produced images of laundresses at work, and the central character in Emile Zola’s novel l’Assommoir, published in 1877, is a laundress.