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Details / Information for A Woman's Work

A Woman's Work

1912
(American, 1871–1951)
America
oil on canvas
Framed: 97.2 x 82.2 x 6.4 cm (38 1/4 x 32 3/8 x 2 1/2 in.); Unframed: 80.3 x 65.4 cm (31 5/8 x 25 3/4 in.)
Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White 1964.160
Location: 208 American Gilded Age and Realism
Public Domain
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Did You Know?

According to John Sloan's diary, this painting was made in March 1912 at his apartment on East 22nd Street, New York.

Description

Trained as a journalist, the young Sloan explored social issues more vigorously than most of the painters of his time, portraying working-class urbanites engaged in ordinary activities. He observed this particular scene through a rear window of his Manhattan apartment. Perched on a narrow fire escape, a woman hangs fresh laundry to dry on clotheslines strung between tenements. As evidenced by the painting, the labors of American women at the turn of the 1900s were most often confined to the domestic realm.
Oil painting of a woman on the right hanging laundry on a line from a metal balcony. The laundry, created with thick, mostly white paint strokes, extends across the center of the painting in front of red brick buildings. The woman has a light skin tone, wearing a blue dress and her hair in a bun and holding a clothespin in her mouth.

A Woman's Work

1912

John Sloan

(American, 1871–1951)
America

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