When Edgar Degas first turned his attention to the laundresses of Paris in the 1870s, he was not alone—yet his persistent fascination with these working women set him apart. Between 1869 and 1895, he created at least twenty works on the theme, but Repasseuse c.1874 - Edgar Degas - Musée Angladon Avignon stands out for its raw immediacy and intimacy. Unlike the more polished images of bourgeois life popular at the time, Degas’s laundresses were sometimes considered almost too real, even “brutal,” by contemporary critics.

This painting, created around 1876, captures a moment in the daily grind of Parisian labor that was rarely dignified in art. The scene is stripped to essentials: a single woman, sleeves rolled, leans over her ironing, her face flushed with heat and fatigue. The harsh, slanting light picks out the sheen of the iron and the damp linen, while her heavy-lidded eyes and slack mouth speak of exhaustion. Degas’s brushwork is loose and energetic, echoing the repetitive, physical nature of her work.

Unlike Jean-François Millet’s more sentimental washerwomen, Degas offers no narrative of redemption or rural idyll—only the unvarnished reality of urban labor. The composition’s tight framing and the woman’s direct, almost confrontational presence make the viewer a witness to her toil. The exact provenance of this painting is less well documented than some of Degas’s other works, but it is now housed in the Musée Angladon in Avignon, part of a collection assembled in the twentieth century. Repasseuse belongs to a crucial period in Degas’s career, as he moved away from academic history painting toward scenes of contemporary life, aligning himself with the emerging Impressionist movement—though he always maintained a certain distance from its plein air approach.

The laundress motif, repeated and reworked, became a signature of his social observation. Today, this painting stands as both a record of a vanished Paris and a testament to Degas’s unflinching eye for the realities of modern existence.