School Of Barbizon

This beautiful, realistic painting from the mid-19th century is one of Babizon's works, a genre painting of daily life in the countryside, seen without artifice with the harsh reality of country work. The exhausted washerwoman poses in fine detail, her elbow resting on the fence, her laundry on her head in a wicker basket, the zinc basin on her left. The expression on her face expresses her resignation and weariness, very significant in a work imbued with empathy. She climbs back up to the farm, duty done, and we notice her pretty hands, those of labor; the tones, like the preponderance of the fence in a landscape of ethereal-colored fields; everything in this composition draws the eye and makes us admire her courage; the riverbed is really too low.An exercise in realism and authenticity, typical of the period when the countryside was entering Parisian homes... This painting, in very good condition, is set in a more recent gilded wood frame with a wide cornice. A fine, highly successful painting