Berthe Morisot - Hanging the Laundry out to Dry Triptych

Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (Suspendre le linge pour sécher), painted in 1875 in oil on canvas by Berthe Morisot, is an Impressionist landscape showing several women hanging white laundry on long lines across a communal drying yard near Gennevilliers. A rustic house, wooden fence, cart, distant fields and smokestacks place this everyday domestic labor within the changing suburban landscape around Paris. Morisot painted the work while staying at the Manet family house in Gennevilliers, where the broad fields stretched toward the Seine. Her thick, visible brushstrokes in pale greens, blues, whites and pinks transform the quiet rhythms of everyday suburban life into a luminous study of modern work and open-air landscape. The painting was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1876 as Un percher de blanchisseuse.