Until well into the twentieth century, running water was what came through the roof when it rained, and didn’t come from a tap. Although only the rich could afford to wear clothes for short periods and expect them to be laundered, soiled clothing and linen still had to be washed, normally in the nearest outdoor body of water. This weekend I’m celebrating the many centuries that women washed clothes outdoors, and were painted as part of the landscape. This first article covers the period up to the height of Impressionism at the end of the 1870s, and tomorrow’s resumes in 1880 and concludes in the early twentieth century.

Pierre-Salomon Domenchin de Chavanne’s Landscape with Washerwomen, probably from around 1700-20, shows a common sight, as do many early landscapes: a small group of women have taken sheets and clothes in large wicker baskets to a small lake, and are washing them as well as they can.

Alessandro Magnasco’s Landscape with Washerwomen (1710-20) shows a similar scene, the women having walked down from the town glimpsed in the distance. At the lower left is a man out hunting with his dog and gun.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

Henri Harpignies had initially learned to paint in oils, but from 1851 also took to watercolour. He painted this dawn View of Moulins in watercolour between about 1850-60, close to the dead centre of France. This looks over the Allier River, past the line of washerwomen on its far bank, towards the spires and towers of the town whose linen was being cleaned in that river.

By this time, in northern France, the move towards Impressionism was just starting. The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge.

The bridge shown here had been built in 1654, to replace a series of predecessors from the first in 1620. It connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

By the late nineteenth century, with the growth of towns and cities, laundry had became more organised, as shown in Martín Rico’s Washerwomen of Varenne (1865). A group of fifteen women, some with babies and children, are on the bank of the local river, most of them probably performing this as a commercial service, as it was one of the few occupations open to women of the lower classes. For Rico they transform his landscape with their activity and the rhythm of their figures.

Working women are also featured in some of Eugène Boudin’s painterly oil sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Washerwoman near Trouville from 1872-76. This laundress appears to be beating her washing with a mallet to drive the dirt out.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in the sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

While most of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes are relatively unpopulated, he also experimented with introducing more figures into the foreground of some, including this riverside view of Washerwomen near Champagne from 1879. They appear to have brought their washing down to the water in wicker baskets, on an ancient wheelbarrow.

In the first of these two collections of paintings of the city of Istanbul and its surroundings, I looked a little at its history, then views painted by European visitors during the nineteenth century, reaching the work of the Italian artist Alberto Pasini and his signature green melons.

In 1882, Pasini painted this view By the Fountain, Constantinople combining a small market, with its melon seller of course, and three horses sheltering as well as they can from the blazing midday sun.

Seven years later, Pasini painted A Market Scene showing an eclectic mixture of produce, ranging from live chickens to pots and the ever-present melons. To the left of centre is a ramshackle horse-drawn carriage.

A Mosque (1886) is the second of Pasini’s two paintings in the Met, and a marked contrast from the earlier one. There are no smart carriages here, and most of the exterior of the building is in need of decoration if not repair. But there’s a small market running, and you can still get melons too, as shown in the detail below.

The great Swedish artist Anders Zorn visited Turkey in 1886.

One portrait he completed before leaving the country is this Bedouin Girl (1886) he saw in Constantinople.

Although little-known outside Turkey, one of its pioneering artists was Osman Hamdi Bey, a senior administrator in the late years of the Ottoman Empire, and its first modern archaeologist. The son of a Grand Vizier, he travelled to Paris in 1860 to study law but changed to become a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger.

The wonderful assortment of characters in Osman Hamdi’s panoramic view of a Persian Carpet Dealer on the Street (1888) reflects the cosmopolitan population of Istanbul, sitting at the gateway between Europe and Asia Minor.

Another familiar street scene of the day, Osman Hamdi’s Public Scribe (1910) may have been part of a campaign to improve education and literacy, particularly among women.

Osman Hamdi’s magnificent Tortoise Trainer from 1906 is by far his best-known painting, and set the record for the highest price paid for a Turkish painting when it was sold in 2004 for $3.5 million.

Its ingenious allegory can be read in at least two ways. The artist may have been self-critical of his painstakingly slow work; tortoises are not only inherently slow, but in the early eighteenth century had been used in Istanbul to bear lit candles for evening outings. This painting also had a greater political meaning, as the tortoise trainer wears traditional Ottoman religious costume from before the middle of the nineteenth century, and is training the tortoises with a traditional Turkish ney flute.

In that sense, it’s a satire on the slow, faltering, and often ineffective reforms made to the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century, an issue with which Osman Hamdi had much personal experience. This resulted in a time of increasing social and political upheaval, preceding the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 which changed the basis of rule in the empire, followed by the breakup of the empire after the First World War.

Michael Zeno Diemer’s brilliant painting of The Ahırkapı Lighthouse (1906-07) shows one of the oldest tower lighthouses at one of the most notable coastal landmarks: the southern entrance to the Straits of Bosporus, to the south of Istanbul. This lighthouse is on the European side; its opposite number is the Kadıköy İnciburnu lighthouse to the east, which would be off the right edge of this painting.

In late March 1907 Paul Signac travelled with the painter Henri Person (1876-1926) to Constantinople, where they painted for six weeks before returning to France. This is the only accessible finished painting from Signac’s visit to what’s known in French as La Corne d’Or, or The Golden Horn, (1907). Using the same compositional technique that had proved so successful in his views of Venice, this shows the Süleymaniye Mosque on the Third Hill from the north-west, on the western (European) side of the Bosporus Strait.

In the foreground are brightly coloured rowing boats taking part in what looks like a regatta, and a row of sailing ships on moorings, all in the waters of the Golden Horn. The mosque is relatively desaturated as it dissolves into the distant pink and gold sky. This mosque was built between 1550-57 for Suleiman the Magnificent, and encloses the mausoleums of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and his wife. It’s one of the best-known sights in the city of Istanbul, and an ideal view for Signac’s treatment.

At that point, bathed in Signac’s colour and light, I’m afraid it’s time to cross the Bosporus and return to Europe.