La blanchisseuse

This work will be included in the forthcoming supplement to K.E. Maison’s Catalogue raisonné de l’OEuvre de Daumier, currently being prepared by the Comité Honoré Daumier. In 1846, Honoré Daumier moved to 9 quai d'Anjou on Paris's Île Saint-Louis. In the period that followed, the artist, better known for his caricatures of barristers and theatrical scenes of saltimbiques, turned toward the city's working class citizens. From the crowded riders of a third-class railway carriage to the local washing women, Daumier began to create realistic observations of everyday life. Daumier's exhausted laundresses, anonymous figures of poverty, display the same slow gestures, the same bowed forms, the same weight and compactness as Millet's gleaners (Fig. 1). And it is this sensitivity to the quotidian reality of the underclass which lends both painters' work 'a universal dimension', raising what could have remained mere genre painting, picturesque and sentimental, to the level of history painting.