The painter that Toulouse-Lautrec admired and even tried to emulate, Edgar Degas, was like himself a descendant of an aristocratic family. But unlike the notorious painter of Montmartre, Degas stood aloof from bohemianism and maintained a very orthodox sense of class division and belonging that became even more emphasized towards the end of his life (Kendall, 38). As a result, his representation of laundresses differs from that of Toulouse-Lautrec in that Degas renders them as archetypes for their social class, as ordinary women performing a very physically demanding job, focusing on the activity rather than the protagonists.
Indeed, as attested by Richard Kendall in Degas- Images of Women, and Trewin Copplestone in Methods of the Masters- Degas, the lifestyle of Parisian laundresses was far from being an easy one: they had to work in a hot, humid atmosphere that notoriously led to illness, on minimal wages in a time when the laundry industry of France was so famous that laundry was being sent to Paris from England (Kendall, 40; Copplestone, 91). It was this hardship that Degas emphasized in paintings such as Reading the Letter (1884) and Woman Ironing (1892), his characters displaying gestures of exhaustion, despair and pain in an environment meant to accentuate their physical exertion. Although the figure of the laundress was also widely associated with flirtatiousness and prostitution (Kendall, 41), Degas ignored any aspect that might have subdued the social message of his works and rendered the laundresses simply as hard working women trying to earn a living.
Reading the Letter is a prime example of Degas’ attempt to shed light on the grim world of the laundresses, depicting two women in what seems to be a break from their work. The woman in the closest plane leans on the table displaying folded shirts with her arms crossed, staring at them as in exhaustion after a tedious work, while the woman in the secondary plane reads aloud a letter, her crutched back turned away from the pile of soiled and dripping laundry that needs more work as if in a gesture of rebellion, her right hand rested on her abdomen as if wiping away the soap and water, her left hand holding the piece of paper delicately as if not to wet it, while her open mouth and head thrown on her back suggests not only exhaustion, but also hysteria and despair. By emphasizing their gestures, Degas distracts the viewer’s attention from the fact that their features are not individualized, that the women could be any of the thousand laundresses working in Paris. The theatrical pose of the woman reading the letter contrasts to the numbness of the woman leaning on the table, as if hinting towards the idea that however trivial or serious the content of the piece of paper is, their pain, boredom or joy simply does not matter for the society he knew.
Although Woman Ironing seems to display a more individualized situation, since there is only one character in our focus, the fact that she is rendered in profile, her arms tensed in ironing, causing her back to lean forward above the ironing board, suggests that it is the effort, not the woman performing it that matters. Degas even goes further, ‘forgetting’ to draw her eyes, as if in a subtle hint to the idea that this woman has been robbed of her judgment and opinions, that she has become a mere robot performing her everyday duty.
Although this latter painting thematically resembles Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Blanchisseuse, the difference between the two in terms of the protagonist’s pose is striking. Whereas in Woman Ironing the woman’s bent position suggests abasement and conformity to life’s hardship, in La Blanchisseuse, Carmen’s leaning on her hands, head lifted up in gazing through the window seems more like a statement of the model’s freedom of spirit and courage to stop from doing her work and dream. This contrast between the two paintings can be explained by arguing that no matter how sympathetic towards his models Degas actually was, his view of society as clearly cut into social classes and the fact that he considered himself from a completely different class than the laundresses induced in his paintings his feelings of condescended pity not towards a specific woman, but laundresses as a class. He was perhaps too impressed by their effort and looked at them from too big a social distance to notice any trace of humanity or aspiration.
Thus, whereas Toulouse-Lautrec stepped down from the aristocratic pedestal separating him from his model and observed in her perhaps the same aspirations and feelings he knew there were in himself, Degas stopped at analyzing them only as an outsider looking at them in their social content, and saw nothing but bêtes humaine-human beasts according to Giles Néret (Néret, 134)- some poor, exhausted women reduced to the condition of labor animals.Images:
Degas, Edgar. Self Portrait, http://artroots.com/art2/degas.jpg.
Degas, Edgar. Reading the Letter, 1884. The Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries.
Degas, Edgar. Woman Ironing, 1892. Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries of Merseyside (Walker Art Galleries).
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de. La Blanchisseuse.1886-1887. Private collection, location unknown.