The Cleveland Museum of art explores Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses in the exhibition “Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism.”

It is the largest selection of these works ever seen together.

The artworks from this series — revolutionary in their emphasis on women’s work, the strenuousness of such labor, and social class — were featured in Degas’s most significant exhibitions, where they were praised by critics as epitomizing modernity. The nearly 100 works exhibited from more than 30 European and American collections reveal that depictions of laundresses by the artist and his contemporaries featured some of the most striking formal innovations of the time.

According to Britany Salsbury, CMA’s curator of prints and drawings, “Degas carried out some of the most striking experimentation of his long career throughout his laundress series. The subject fascinated him beginning as a young man in the 1850s and continuing until his final decade of work as an artist. The images that he created of these women are fascinating for their emphasis on labor itself rather than the stereotypes that persisted about them throughout popular culture. The women who undertook work ironing and washing often did so because they lacked other options, and they endured tremendously difficult working conditions.”

Laundresses undertook some of the most difficult and poorly paid labor at the time, leading some in the industry to supplement their income through sex work. The depictions of these women featured in “Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism” provide a surprising contrast to more familiar Impressionist representations of upper-middle-class leisure.

The exhibition includes works by contemporaries of Degas — Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard — as well as painters that Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honore Daumier to Pablo Picasso. It also presents ephemera, such as posters, photographs and books that reveals the widespread interest that Parisians of all social classes had in the topic of laundresses during the late 1800s.

“The extraordinary works assembled for this exhibition reveal a new and exciting aspect of an otherwise well-known art historical movement,” according to William Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exceptional holdings of 19th-century French art situate us to present such an inventive exhibition, and we look forward to sharing works of impressive quality — from Degas’s private sketchbooks to some of his most celebrated canvases alongside those by his colleagues — that have never before been seen together.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a 240-page, illustrated catalog that includes thematic essay by scholars of art history French studies, literature and history. It is the first publication to examine and document Degas’s portrayals of Parisian laundresses.

“Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism” will be on display through Jan. 14, 2024, in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd.

Tickets are $15 for adults, $12 for senior citizens, students and children age 6 to 17 and free for children 5 and younger and for CMA members. Tickets can be reserved online at www.clevelandart.org and by calling 216-421-7350.