The Washerwoman

Painted as a pair, The Washerwoman and The Woman Drawing Water at the Cistern (to the right) depict servants engaged in humble, domestic activities in the kitchen. In The Washerwoman the title figure scrubs laundry in a large wooden wash bucket. Jean-Siméon Chardin paints her gazing away from her work, as if something has distracted her attention—or as if she is captured in an idle daydream. The other composition features a woman in profile, her face hidden. She stoops to fill a jug of water from a large copper cistern, above which hangs a glistening side of meat. Both compositions, with their focus on domestic interiors and the effects of light on a variety of surfaces, owe much to 17th-century Dutch painting (see Galleries 23, 24, and 27).

French critic and philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) declared Chardin’s talent at handling paint “so magical as to induce despair.” This “magical” skill is especially obvious in the shifting, shimmering colors of the woman’s skirt in Woman Drawing Water at the Cistern and in the mastery with which Chardin describes every texture and surface—fabric, ceramic, glass, copper, meat, wood, skin, fur, stone, and liquid.