Laundresses before the Wasserturm, Nuremberg 

Samuel Prout made this watercolor titled Laundresses before the Wasserturm, Nuremberg. The Wasserturm, or water tower, is in the background, and women doing laundry in the foreground. The artist is interested in medieval buildings and the everyday life of the working class. Watercolors like this one, made in the first half of the 19th century, appealed to British tourists traveling through continental Europe, looking for quaint scenes of pre-industrial life. The artist has carefully rendered the architecture of Nuremberg but he has also included staffage - figures placed in the scene to add interest. We might ask what it meant for well-to-do Britons to collect images of working-class Europeans in this period of rapid industrial change? What desires and anxieties were at play here? An art historian might turn to travel writing, guidebooks, and the history of tourism to understand the cultural work this image performed.