Their feelings subsume them, and their shapes embody these feelings.Daumier painted this picture, called either The Burden or The Washerwoman, in several versions The basic motif is the same in each. A woman is lugging a heavy basket of washing down the street, with a little child toddling beside her Her strain is palpable. She is bending against the weight of her load, while pushing against an impeding wind. And so great is the sense of effort, you could believe she was tugging a barge too.
She seems to be moving with the kind of motion you get in dreams, where you walk and make no headway at all. And this is not in fact the most ag-onised version of the image.But it is the most shape-conscious, and shape is where its power lies. The woman and her burden make a firmly contoured and outlined shape, with several sub-shapes inside it. These shapes are clear; more than that, they have a strong identity in their own right, so that they are in tension with the natural shapes of her body. Her pictorial shaping applies a pressure, a bondage to her anatomy It enacts and aggravates her bodily strain. These shapes are what make the figure’s sensations so palpable.Her contours hold her down, forcing her body against its human uprightness.
The top edge of the figure, from laundry to head, bonds it into three climbing steps. The shoulder, the focus of her labour, juts up in a rounded right-angle hump. The face and neck, as they push forward, are drawn out into a pink phallus. The top edge of her face, and the contour of her shoulder, lie in an almost straight horizontal line, fixing the head low and rigid. Her right arm is pulled round into a curving hoop.In the process, of course, there is distortion.
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