Washerwomen of Fouesnant by Bouguereau

Washerwomen of Fouesnant by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1869, is an oil painting on canvas of Breton peasant women doing laundry in a river, carrying their baskets of clothing home atop their heads. Bouguereau creates a warmly realistic portrayal of daily life among the common people, and the people of Brittany were a popular subject among French genre painters of the 19th century, most famously Paul Gauguin. The central figure of the woman with heavy basket on her head stands with the solidity and dignity of ancient Greek caryatids such as at the Athenian Acropolis. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) was a French painter who trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Villa Medici in Rome. He exhibited with great success in the French Salon and became one of most renowned and wealthy artists of his era. Bouguereau worked in the French Academic tradition, a school of late 19th century modern painters who concentrated on the human figure and classical subjects in highly polished works of optical realism. His main interest was the female figure, usually rendered in classical, finely drawn contours, in subjects that were often sentimental. Bouguereau's reputation diminished greatly in the 20th century with the rise of modern art, but interest in his traditional figurative paintings has surged again in recent years.