Family wash day: Once a common sight

Thu 21 Nov 2024

Monday morning helped launch Frances Vida Lahey‘s (1882–1968) career when the painting of two young women doing the family wash — one at the tub scrubbing, the other taking clothes out of the boiler, both surrounded with a swirl of steam — was exhibited in October 1912 at the 24th Annual Exhibition of the Queensland Art Society held at the Brisbane Town Hall (illustrated). Lahey was an established presence on the Brisbane art scene by then, aged 30, and having been exhibiting with the Society since 1902, however just the scale of the painting would have made it a stand out in the exhibition alone. Monday morning (illustrated), is now Lahey’s most famous, and one of the Gallery’s most loved works.

The subject of women’s work was unusual for painters at this time, as Australian artists generally depicted the more genteel aspects of women’s lives; such as reading or sewing. Monday morning however portrays a once common sight in Australian households — wash day — in the past, Mondays were often set aside as a day for families to wash their clothes, now a recording of a by-gone era with the arrival of electricity and mechanical aids.

Brisbane Town Hall

Both public and critical responses to the painting were enthusiastic, and it was immediately donated to the Queensland National Art Gallery through Art Society member and Queensland poet, Emily Coungeau.

Interestingly, an illustration of Monday morning in the Art Society’s exhibition catalogue indicates that there may have been an earlier version of the work, perhaps destroyed in the March 1912 fire at the Fitzroy Building in Adelaide Street where Lahey had her studio and the Art Society their rooms. The reproduction shows a compositional change from the version in the Gallery’s Collection.

Of all household tasks, the weekly wash was the most arduous and the most unpopular at the time, washing machines did not arrive in most households until the 1950s, and as depicted in Monday morning, laundry facilities were simple — a wooden, metal or concrete tub, combined with a washing board and a wringer — the routine of heating water on a stove or boiling as seen here, soaking in preparation for hand-scrubbing with a bar of soap was hot, sweaty, and backbreaking, and the relentless steam in the sub-tropical heat and humidity of Queensland would have been unbearable.

By painting this domestic scene, it can be said that Lahey’s aim was to shine light on women’s work as there seemed a definite need to create respect for the ordinary work of women, using it as subject matter gave status to this necessary form of service. Lahey was interested in the depiction of female figures in domestic surrounds throughout her career, however none of those images possess the authority or impact of Monday morning.

Vida Lahey ‘Monday morning’ 1912

Lahey was from a moderately affluent background and the painting was heavily staged — the artist’s younger sister Esme modelled as the figure at the washtub, the other figure is Flora Campbell, a family friend.

The artist's father, an Irish-born farmer and timber-miller had moved the family from ‘Sidney House’ (illustrated) some three years earlier to ‘Greylands’ (illustrated).

'Greylands', built in 1877 was part of a parcel of land originally purchased by Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior (1819-92) in 1859. On his death, the British-born pastoralist and politician left a group of Flemish and Dutch paintings to the newly formed state of Queensland. When the Queensland National Art Gallery opened in 1895, his bequest was the nucleus of our Collection.

One of Brisbane’s earliest grand homes built in Indooroopilly, 'Greylands' was the residence of the Lahey family from 1910–12 where the laundry room in the painting was located, indicating that the Lahey’s enjoyed the modern conveniences for the time of piped water and built-in concrete troughs.

Vida Lahey 1903

Sidney House

Greylands

Lahey was bom at Pimpama in 1882, a northern suburb in the City of Gold Coast, some 45km south-east of Brisbane, the eldest child in a family of eleven. Lahey trained with local art master R Godfrey Rivers at the Brisbane Technical College from 1898 until 1904 (illustrated) and in her early 20s spent two periods of study at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Arts, Melbourne, in 1905–06 and 1909; conventional training for a young Australian artist in the Edwardian era. Her instructors at the Gallery School were the distinguished academician, Bernard Hall, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria and Master of the School of Arts, and the prominent Australian painter Frederick McCubbin.

Monday morning therefore follows the tradition established at the Gallery School, where students were encouraged to produce large narrative paintings. Painted in Brisbane after the artist returned from Melbourne, the work was Lahey’s version of an academic set-piece.

Brisbane Technical College

National Gallery School

In 1915 Lahey went to London for family reasons and unofficially to further her studies but became heavily involved in war-work. Lahey painted few works on the scale of Monday morning, this outstanding work by the young Lahey remains the artist’s only surviving large-scale work of the period.

Delve deeper into the QAGOMA Collection

Vida Lahey 'Busy fingers' 1913

Vida Lahey 'The carters’ rest, Eagle Street' 1913

Vida Lahey 'Wattle in a yellow vase' c.1912-15

Curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA