Bal des blanchisseuses au lavoir Popincourt 1872

What you are looking at

This is a wood engraving depicting a crowded indoor dance hall during the Mi-Carême (mid-Lent) carnival celebration of 1872 at the Popincourt lavoir (public washing house) in Paris. The scene is dense with figures: working-class Parisians—laundresses and their companions—fill the space in a mixture of dancers and spectators. The setting is a large covered hall strung with elaborate swags and garlands of fabric draped from tall wooden posts, creating a festive canopy overhead. The floor is packed with bodies in motion; couples dance while others stand watching, sitting on benches, or moving through the crowd. The dress is mixed: women in full skirts and bonnets or hats, men in dark suits and hats. The lighting is even and bright, rendered through the fine cross-hatching characteristic of wood engraving, which picks out the texture of clothing and the energy of movement across the entire composition. The moment captures not a single choreographed moment but the lived chaos of a popular social dance—simultaneous groups in different states of movement, conversation, and observation.

The dancing

The dancers visible in the composition are in closed holds typical of the period's ballroom dances, with couples at various distances across the floor. No single couple dominates; instead, the artist has distributed figures of different scales throughout the space, creating depth and a sense of many simultaneous interactions. Skirts are full and in motion; one woman's dress is caught mid-swing in the foreground. The poses suggest waltzing or polka—a turning, spinning embrace rather than processional or figured movement. Bodies are upright and formal despite the popular setting; there is no jig-dancing or folk posture here. The spectators at the edges lean in with interest, and standing figures occupy spaces between the dancing couples.

The dance depicted

This depicts the Mi-Carême ball (mid-Lent carnival dance), a working-class Parisian tradition where laundresses and their friends gathered in public spaces to dance. The dances shown are the period ballroom dances—waltz and polka—adapted for popular street-level use. The lavoir was both a community workplace and social venue; the event captures the democratization of ballroom dancing that had occurred by the 1870s. What marks this as *not* elite ballroom is the scale, density, and social mix of the crowd, and the outdoor or semi-outdoor (covered hall) setting rather than a formal salon. The image is a document of how middle and working-class Parisians danced in their own spaces.

How it was made

This is a wood engraving, a technique that uses the end-grain of a wooden block cut with fine burins to produce a detailed black-and-white image. Wood engraving allowed for much finer detail and smaller scale than woodcut, making it ideal for newspaper and periodical reproduction. The work was likely published as an illustration in a Parisian newspaper or magazine covering the carnival season—the title inscription below the image and the journalistic composition suggest this context. The technique's capacity for dense cross-hatching made it well suited to rendering crowds and complex interior scenes. This means the image circulated widely in printed form among literate Parisians, not as a unique object but as a reproducible record of a newsworthy social event.

About this work

This wood engraving documents a specific moment in Parisian popular culture: the Mi-Carême ball held at a public lavoir in 1872. It shows working-class Parisians—principally laundresses and their companions—dancing waltz and polka in a festively decorated hall. The image is both a document of social history and a record of how ballroom dance had penetrated working-class leisure by the late nineteenth century. It belongs in a gallery of dance imagery because it captures the lived reality of social dancing outside the academy or the elite ballroom, and because it is a primary source for understanding what dance meant to ordinary people in this era.

How to look at it

Attend to the density and distribution of figures across the frame—the artist's choice to show many simultaneous couples rather than a single focal pair emphasizes the communal, egalitarian nature of the event. Note how the swags of fabric create a sense of enclosure and festivity despite the building's utilitarian origin. Look at the poses: the couples are dancing in the closed ballroom hold, not in any folk or processional formation, yet they do so in a crowded, informal space. The engraver has captured movement through the slight tilt and lean of bodies and the catch of flying skirts, not through exaggerated gesture.

The artist

The attribution to Georges Redon is marked with a question mark in the catalogue record, and the image does not clearly bear a signature. Redon (1841–1916) was primarily known as a painter and lithographer working in the Symbolist and later modernist modes, not principally as a journalistic illustrator. If this attribution is correct, it represents an atypical work in his practice—a straightforward documentary illustration rather than imaginative or symbolic imagery. Without confirmation, the authorship remains uncertain.

The period

The 1870s in Paris saw the consolidation of the waltz and polka as the dominant social dances across all classes. The early-century elite monopoly on ballroom dance had broken down by mid-century. Popular balls and carnival celebrations like the Mi-Carême had ancient roots but were increasingly organized and attended in the nineteenth century as a form of working-class leisure. The lavoir itself was a key social space in working-class Paris, particularly for women, and events hosted there had community significance. Journalistic interest in such scenes reflects a broader nineteenth-century documentary impulse to record the life of the city and its people.

Where it lives

The work is recorded as sourced from Wikimedia Commons, suggesting it is held in a public collection but the specific institution is not documented in the provided record. It appears to have been a periodical illustration, likely published in a Parisian newspaper or magazine covering carnival events in 1872, and may later have been collected or archived as a document of Parisian social history.

Dance in this work

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