Women Washing Clothes at Etretat, ca. 1890 - ca. 1894

Eugène Boudin was born in 1824, the year in which the exhibition at the Paris Salon was held that would be of great significance for the awareness of the Barbizon School. At this Salon, French Romantic artists such as Delacroix and Géricault and English landscape painters such as Bonington and Constable were exhibited. These confirmed the Barbizon painters in their new vision of landscape painting and confirmed the split between the classics and the moderns. Boudin thus began his career as a painter at a time when modern landscape painters had already made their mark on French painting. Their influence is great and Boudin also undergoes the inspirational effect of these artists. As the son of a skipper, he preferred painting seascapes, in which great attention was paid to the large expanse of sky with clouds above the water and to the light that covered the entire landscape. Under the influence of Isabey, Boudin produced a whole series of beach scenes from the 1860s onwards, mainly populated by bourgeois people who spent their leisure time on the coast. But less well-to-do people such as fishermen and fisherwomen also deserve his attention, as is shown in Washerwomen at Etretat. This work was made in the last decade of his life. Typical of many such paintings is the division of the composition into three horizontal, parallel zones occupied by the sky, the sea and the beach. The sense of the atmospheric effect of natural light heralds Impressionism. The cool, silvery light and the dull, pale tones are enlivened here and there by the white of the hoods and the red in the clothes in the foreground. The simplification of the form and the free, suggestive invoice give this little work, despite its anecdotal element, a broader and more enduring value of expression.