Please join us in congratulating doctoral candidate Jillian Kruse and Dr. Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art and CWRU alumna (BA Art History and English), on the opening of the exhibition Degas and the Laundress!
On view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery of the CMA until January 14, the exhibition is the first to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, as well as to place this important series in context with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries—including Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition has been highlighted as a fall “must see” by both The New York Times and Vogue!
Jillian served as a curatorial intern on this exhibition, researching and locating ephemera for potential loan and purchase and identified laundress-related prints and drawings in the CMA’s collection for inclusion in the show. Jillian also contributed to the accompanying catalogue of the same name by Britany Salsbury, published by Yale University Press. For the catalogue, Jillian researched and co-authored the book’s chronology, which covers important moments in Degas’s life as well as the history of the nineteenth-century Parisian laundry trade. Britany and Jillian also worked together to compile and translate critical writings from Degas’s time about his laundress series.
Jillian has published an essay developed from out of her research for the exhibition, titled “Degas and the Laundress: Thinking about the (In)visibility of Women’s Labor in Impressionism,” which has been published as part of the CMA’s Thinker blog:
Please also save the date for the virtual symposium Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism on November 16 & 17, organized by Britany Salsbury; Laurel Garber, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Nicole Georgopulos, University of British Columbia; and Jillian Kruse. For more information and tickets, see: