She’s seen in silhouette, and from behind something about how she crouches there, balancing herself on one hand, looks assertive, like a mistress surveying her domain, not routine like a maid accomplishing her work.
She might, however, keep its contents carefully supervised her linens might still carry old dowry-overtones and help to constitute her woman’s identity. Is the woman who crouches before it the mistress, or the maid? The mistress of this cupboard surely doesn’t make up her own beds, or set her own table. This is a bourgeois household: there’s plenty of linen, beautifully laundered and folded and sorted. Light from the oil lamp makes the piles of white linen glow against the darkness of the further interior and throws confusing shadows backwards from the open cupboard doors, so that the space seems like a cave opened up in the night, mysterious and ambiguous, a revelation whose dimensions at first we cannot quite understand. It’s dark, so she has put down a lamp on the floor beside her. A woman crouches in front of a linen cupboard, searching for something.
Here is something I’ve never seen painted before, and yet I feel I know the subject intimately it’s familiar from daily life.
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