Water: Small Crouching Washerwoman

In this bronze figure of a young washerwoman, the laundress is shown kneeling, her right leg bent under her, her left side supported by a wide-mouthed, overturned jar from which water flows. The woman's face is turned to the garment grasped in her large, right hand, and though when viewed from the side she seems absorbed in her chore, from the front her gaze looks blank and brooding, as if she is unconscious of the present moment. The pensive washerwoman—with her straight, fleshy nose, big eyes, wide, full mouth, and softly curving nude body—represents Renoir’s ideal of female beauty. A few strands of her long hair, having escaped from the bun at the nape of her neck, curl gracefully down her back. The pliancy of her flowing locks, which is echoed in the washerwoman's handling of the fabric, is characteristic of the treatment of the sculpture’s material in general, which shows many traces of the artist’s touch in the wax in which the piece was originally molded. Representations of women engaged in everyday occupations such as embroidering, reading, or bathing were common in late-nineteenth-century art, as exemplified by Degas's bronze bathers and Dalou's Reading Woman. From the mid-nineteenth century, many artists were drawn to the broader subject of toiling people, as rendered in Dalou's Peasant or van Gogh's Corn Harvest in Provence, 1888. But whereas works belonging to this genre typically concentrated on the task being performed, Renoir's washerwoman, though crouching in the characteristic position of her occupation, seems not to be fully engaged in washing the garment that she holds in her hands. The fact that she is represented in the nude, and that the first part of the work's title is "Water," indeed transforms her from a flesh-and-blood figure to an allegorical one symbolizing her tradeWasherwomen abound in European art from the eighteenth century to the early 1900s, but Renoir's version of the theme differs from those of Chardin, Greuze, Degas, Picasso, and others, in which the figure is depicted in contemporary dress, not in the nude. In fact, French eighteenth-century renditions, while tending to emphasize the washerwoman's physical beauty—with more than a touch of innuendo alluding to her inferior social status (and hence her supposed sexual availability)—were created in a specific historical and class context. Likewise, Degas and Picasso, in striking contrast to Renoir, both emphasized the women’s wearying toil. To his ahistorical and suprapersonal representation—which was in all probability influenced by Maillol's female images—Renoir added the allegorical Element of water issuing from the container at the washerwoman's feet. The association of the traditionally female chore of washing clothes is therefore here linked with that of fresh spring water, to which the connotation of purity has been attached throughout the ages. Through Renoir's allegorical representation of water as a cleaning and purifying agent, then, the image of a washerwoman links an age-old tradition with a contemporary interest in the theme of human toil. Here, however, she represents not only a certain period or class; rather, she is symbolic of one of the Four Elements once thought to be the basis of all matter—water, in its earthbound as well as in its transcendent aspects.