In their quest for subject matter that spoke to the contemporary urban experience, Degas and Naturalist writers such as the Goncourt brothers and Émile Zola discovered the image of the laundress.

In his novel The Dram Shop, Zola describes laundresses at work, detailing the physically demanding labor involved in the act of pressing the iron against the board (see Reff, Degas: The Artist's Mind). Similarly, Degas emphasizes the strenuous effort involved in the task of ironing by painting the woman in a bent posture. Both writer and painter communicate the oppressive environment in which these women worked. In Degas's painting, for example, we see a room filled with the steam from the iron and may imagine the suffocating heat.

Both Zola and Degas, however, also articulate the beauty of such a scene. Degas's laundress is darkened by shadow, her figure silhouetted against the white background. Light permeates the room and mingles with the steam of the iron. Degas's use of color and his abstract brushwork literally and figuratively illuminate the visual appeal of the environment. One focuses less on the woman's hardship and more on the lyrical rendering of atmosphere, light, and form. Although slides distort images and mask a painting's texture, even in reproduction one can see how Degas uses broad, thick strokes to make the intangible palpable.

Five of Degas's pictures of laundresses, including this one, were shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876.