The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 21, 2025

Horizontally oriented print in black ink on beige paper of a road winding through a hazy scene with people milling about. In the right foreground, a person hangs washing on a line, two more people standing in the empty field behind them. On the left, three more people move around the edges of a fence, behind which the dark silhouettes of buildings rise, made dark with heavy cross-hatch shading.

At the Fortifications, Porte de Versailles

1898

Auguste Louis Lepère

(French, 1849–1918)
France, 19th century
etching
Image: 11.9 x 23.4 cm (4 11/16 x 9 3/16 in.); Plate: 15 x 25.9 cm (5 7/8 x 10 3/16 in.); Sheet: 19 x 28.8 cm (7 1/2 x 11 5/16 in.)
Gift of Ralph King 1920.635
Catalogue raisonné: Lotz-Brissonneau 110
Location: Not on view

Description

Paris underwent a dramatic redesign beginning in the mid-1800s, resulting in its distinctive appearance today but also in the displacement of residents who worked—but could not afford to live—in the city. In this print, Auguste Lepère presented the “zone,” an area on Paris’s periphery where its most economically disadvantaged and disenfranchised inhabitants lived, including some laundresses. Lepère’s image features a laundry line as the singular domestic touch within an otherwise surreal landscape, part of the city but seemingly rural. The inhabitants of the zone used open land to construct makeshift homes without modern amenities, so that they could subsist on the low wages offered by their urban employment.
  • ?–1920
    Ralph King [1855-1926], Cleveland Heights, OH, given to The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
    November 11, 1920–
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Salsbury, Britany. Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023. Mentioned: p. 161, no. 47
  • Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 8, 2023-January 14, 2024).
  • {{cite web|title=At the Fortifications, Porte de Versailles|url=false|author=Auguste Louis Lepère|year=1898|access-date=21 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1920.635