Hanging the Laundry out to Dry

Berthe Morisot

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

Painted in 1875 in Gennevilliers, an outer suburb of Paris, this small yet commanding oil on canvas depicts figures hanging white laundry on lines and fences in a grassy yard before a rustic house, with a distant townscape of smokestacks and soft clouds beyond. The scene is rendered entirely in thick, visible brushstrokes—characteristic of Morisot's Impressionist practice—building texture and luminosity through rapid, confident marks rather than precise detail. Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement and its most prominent female participant, focused throughout her career on domestic subjects and the everyday lives of women, bringing to such scenes a distinctive fluency of touch and a subtle, harmonious palette of blues, lilacs, greens, and pinks. Exhibited at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1876, the work exemplifies Morisot's mature plein-air approach and her capacity to transform an ordinary domestic moment into a resonant study of light, color, and atmosphere.