19th century AD

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Robert L. Herbert

The Porte d'Aval that dominates Courbet's composition was the visual logo for Etretat, used for advertisements and posters of all kinds.[5] It was usually shown together with the isolated needle rock beyond it, but that famous spire was not visible from Le Poittevin's terrace. (A portion of it, viewed from a further distance, can be seen through the arch in Boldini's picture.) Courbet shows the cliff in afternoon light after a storm has passed, leaving a choppy surf below a broken sky. On the left of Courbet's picture is the doorway of a storage cave cut into the limestone cliff. Above it, between a conical hump and some foliage, is a portion of the pathway along which Lartigue's vacationers later picked their way.

Where do the washerwomen figure in Courbet's composition? In the foreground to the right is a wood rack holding a laundress's wooden paddle. This object is quite conspicuous when we look at the original painting (it's just below eye level), but to my knowledge it has never been identified commented upon. It was lodged there for the convenience of women who preferred not to carry their own paddles back and forth, and so it signals the world of women's work right next to the men's fishing boats.[6] Directly above the paddle, on the steeply sloping edge of the beach, are the tiny forms of about a dozen laundresses bent over at work. Until recently these were never noticed and, in fact, the painting was regularly described as Courbet's first large landscape without human figures. Two sharp-eyed historians, Klaus Herding and Robert Rosenblum, have now remarked on them, although they offer only brief comments in passing.[7]

It's true that Courbet's laundresses are easily missed, especially in reproduction. In the original, their white caps and multicolored homespun give them some coloristic distinction from beach and surf, but only if we lift the mental bell glass while looking. The hasty look of a 20th-century eye will skip over them. When Courbet gave them a place in his painting, albeit an inconspicuous one, he revealed two related aspects of his vision. For one thing, the women were frequently in his sight, and his realist's credo required him to be faithful to what he saw, to paint whatever was actually out there, regardless of what it was. For another, he knew that the washerwomen were performing a characteristic human activity on this portion of the beach, and that by including them together with the fishermen's boats, he would be representing a traditional port activity. This knowledge was born of memory and experience, and entered into the genesis of the composition since there's no such thing as "pure" perception. There is only apperception, that is, mentally organized vision.

The laundresses also appear in another Courbet work, this time in large enough scale to give them greater importance, although they're still quite small. They form a foreground strip of activity in the painting at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute that has long been titled The Seaweed Gatherers (1866-69). It was once owned by Mary Cassatt, when it was known simply as Maree montante (Rising Tide).[8] It should be renamed Laundresses at Low Tide, Etretat. To the left, two laundresses are stretching cloth between them; to their right are other women engaged in washing and drying, some standing, others kneeling. Whitish swatches on the beach indicate a few pieces of laundry laid out to dry. Lack of familiarity with Etretat's unique beach laundry made earlier observers think that these small figures were gathering seaweed, otherwise a common activity on Norman shores, but if they had been employed in that labor their poses would have been entirely different.