Although Lautrec's illustration does not stress, as does Michelet's text, the laundress's erotic allure, he was dealing with a theme that was `freighted with a sexual meaning for middle class viewers", who assumed lower-class women in general, and laundresses in particular, to be sexually free and available. 
The laundress was a familiar figure throughout Realist literature and art and as a visual image Lautrec's representation undoubtedly <tag "515648">derives</> from earlier, similar ones by Daumier, Degas, and Steinlen.   

