The washermen (2018) Original Oil Painting by Nicolas Maureau

A profession the nineteenth century reserved entirely for women, moved here into the masculine: The Washermen, from the Scènes de Genre series, echoes paintings like Millet's Washerwomen while reversing who gets to appear at the water's edge doing the work.

The series treats gender as something built rather than natural, and manual labour has always been one of the clearest examples, work coded feminine simply because it was repetitive, domestic, and underpaid rather than because of anything inherent to it. Placing men in the same pose, the same task, exposes how arbitrary that division always was.

Set against the same black background running through the whole series, the figures become part of a shared visual vocabulary, one gesture answering another across a body of work built on exactly this kind of quiet reversal.

Materials used:

oil painting

Details:

• Oil painting on Canvas
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 97 x 130 x 2cm / 97 x 130cm (actual image size)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the back
• Style: Photorealistic
• Subject: People and portraits

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