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Auguste Renoir - The laundress 1880

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From The Art Institute of Chicago:
The theme of the laundress was prevalent in the visual and literary culture of middle-class nineteenth-century France. Aside from Edgar Degas, however, the Impressionists did not regularly take up this subject in their paintings of modern life; when the theme did appear in Impressionist work, it was typically “subordinated to the atmospheric surroundings.”3 The Laundress is indeed an anomaly in the oeuvre of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Although he returned to the subject in the mid-1880s and later though only a handful of times this canvas is likely the artist’s first and only incorporation of the motif during the time when he was actively engaged with the concerns of Impressionism.