Paul-Camille Guigou
La Lavandière
circa 1860
The deep folds of her skirt are dense and ruffled, textured like moist chipped chalk. They fall heavily from her waist and over her kneeling legs, giving the impression of a wilting origami rose suspended in mid-air and slowly moulding itself around a smooth object. It crumples silently and gracefully, encasing its prey entirely like a great webbed hand. Its stem is (one could say) the woman’s back: sun-lit, arched and foreshortened, it stretches into the picture plane and shares a similar tint of a light, almost blinding blue as that of the lake beyond the trees. Studied closely, the woman’s chemise also shares with the water traces of triangular shapes, whether these are made by seams or by ripples. With a bit of imagination, one could interpret that from these faint triangles there is a suggestion of a third patch of blue - the ‘final’ point to the three-sided puzzle - hidden in the picture. It is evidently the most important detail of all, at least in terms of the washerwoman, because its invisible presence is felt strongest in comparison to those which are seen plainly. Whether it is implied through the woman’s distinct posture, the washing board on which she kneels, the bar of soap or, as already proposed, through the triangular anomalies in blue, the river reveals itself as clearly as if it were painted in full view: flowing directly beneath the woman’s arms, bubbling serenely from one end to the other. But Guigou kept it in the shadows: he chose to focus the viewer’s attention not on the task a washerwoman must do, but on the washerwoman herself. He transformed with only his brush the scene’s natural sunlight into the woman’s very own spotlight, almost as if to place her centre stage in a play about her type of everyday life. Her task is not to look at it straight in the face, but to embrace it indifferently and without complaint.
