Ménil-Hubert-sur-Orne Basse-Normandie France

Edgar Degas's Repasseuses (Two Laundresses) of 1884 features an artificially shallow picture space and a reconciliation of solid form and surface reminiscent of Venetian mid-sixteenth-century art in method but here applied with a documentary eye to a casual workaday subject.

By this time Degas has begun to work in pastel, sometimes using a mixed technique with volatile oil mediums, and his indoor series of women at their ablutions carries on his researches into the formal qualities of the voids between closely juxtaposed and superimposed groups.

He spends the summer in Ménil-Hubert with the Valpinçons.