Laundry Girls

Albert Rutherston never became a member of the Camden Town Group, but his friendship with some of the main protagonists and his early involvement with the Fitzroy Street circle make him a noteworthy figure in the history of the group’s development. During his lifetime, he was best known as an illustrator and theatre designer. In a published discussion on painting in 1933, Stanley Casson labelled Rutherston’s characteristic illustrations as ‘thoroughly decadent young creatures with pale blue skins and curly legs prancing about among trees that never existed in landscapes that seem to shake like mirages’.1 Rutherston agreed with this colourful description of his work but rejoined that he had once been ‘a painter of solemn and serious pictures, who painted costermongers, laundry girls, seamstresses, and the like – and very glad I am that I did’.2

Laundry Girls is one of these earlier oil paintings which took as their subject working class women engaged in domestic labour, and it was through such works that Rutherston appeared to align himself for a time with the subject matter of Walter Sickert and other members of the Fitzroy Street Group. The series also included Laundry Girl (whereabouts unknown), exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1907, of which the critic in the Observer wrote, ‘The “Laundry Girl” by Mr A Rothenstein concentrates within one little frame every conceivable kind of ugliness’,3 and Standing Laundress 1909 (private collection),4 which was one of Rutherston’s last paintings in this vein. In 1910 a significant shift occurred in Rutherston’s work and he abandoned his ‘solemn’ method of painting in favour of the imaginative style described by Casson and evident in Tate’s Paddling (Tate N04569).

Laundry Girls depicts two young women in an interior, one seated on a stool and one kneeling on the floor, with a basket full of what looks like tablecloths between them. There are other fabrics such as curtains and a fringed cloth hanging on a drying line, with a wooden screen-fold clothes horse behind them, and another basket of laundry sitting in the left-hand corner of the picture. The girls are dressed in plain and functional skirts and blouses with neckcloths, and the figure on the right also wears an apron. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the laundry of a middle class household would either have been done at home, usually carried out by domestic servants or a laundress hired to come in for the day,5 or it would have been sent out to a commercial laundry or a local washerwoman, usually a working class woman trying to earn some money from home.6 It is not clear from Rutherston’s painting whether the two girls are meant to be domestic servants engaged in doing the laundry for a private household, or laundresses hired from outside to deal with the washing. A reviewer in the Aberdeen Free Press described the work as ‘a brilliant though rather ugly picture of young Jewesses in a laundry’,7 although there is no further information to corroborate this supposition which was perhaps based on no more evidence than the artist’s name.8 The painting was first exhibited at the New English Art Club under the title The Linen Markers, which suggests that the girls are engaged in marking items from the household’s washing with needle and cotton thread so it can be sent to an outside professional laundry. A small mark sewn onto each item would have distinguished the washing from others and ensured its return to the correct house.