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Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir

La laveuse (Washerwoman)

1917

On View in Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden

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The French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a leading painter in the development of Impressionism, a movement in which artists combined objective observation of the natural world with the subjective experience of the artist. This sculpture is one of Renoir’s last works, produced two years before his death in 1919 and in collaboration with Spanish sculptor Richard Guinó Boix. It represents a turn away from his Impressionist beginnings toward a monumental classicism. With the massive La Laveuse, or Washerwoman, Renoir depicts a crouching nude, holding wet drapery in her hands, that recalls Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, sex, fertility, and prosperity. In Roman mythology Venus is often described as being born from the foam of the sea, a generative force essential to the balance of life. Renoir’s sculpture was originally intended as one of a pair of large figures with the subjects “Fire” and “Water,” their elemental opposition to be symbolized by a blacksmith and a washerwoman. The figure of the blacksmith was never completed. The subject of the monumental female nude was one that Renoir returned to repeatedly toward the end of his life, highlighting the artist’s embrace of what he termed “eternal things” in opposition to the fleeting impressions of modernity he once championed. [Cell phone tour, 2019]

  • Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
  • Title La laveuse (Washerwoman)
  • Date 1917
  • Medium Bronze
  • Dimensions unframed | 48 x 22 x 53 in.
  • Credit line Gift of Morton D. May, 1964
  • Object number WU 4198
  • Currently on View Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden

Saint Louis Bicentennial Sculpture Exhibition
Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Missouri), 10/03/1965 - 10/31/1965

1964
Morton D. May, St. Louis

Inscription [on upper surface of base, engraved in metal:] Renoir [circle]

Inscription [on bottom edge, engraved in metal:] Alexis Rudier. / Fondeur, Paris.

This artwork record may be incomplete or need refinement. Our staff actively researches the collection and revises records when new information is available. If you have questions or comments about this record, please contact us.

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