Lavery spent the majority of 1884 at Grez-sur-Loing, an artistic community that he moved onto from Nogent-sur-Marne while studying at the Atelier Julian in Paris. Keen to discover the resort that had inspired William Stott of Oldham and his friend, Frank O'Meara, it was here that he developed new ambitions as a painter.

The theme of the laundress was a common motif for the community and the present work illustrates Robert Louis Stevenson's lines which refers to the village women of Grez who 'wash and wash all day among the fish and waterlilies. It seem[s] as if linen washed there should be specially cool and sweet' ('Forest Notes', Cornhill Magazine, 1876, p.553). A larger work (59½ x 59¼in.) of the same subject exists, 'On the Loing: An Afternoon Chat (Under the Cherry Tree)' which is now in the collection of Ulster Museum, Belfast. Kenneth McConkey (loc. cit.) comments of these two paintings 'This large work is almost a thesis statement of Lavery's plein air style. It was planned upon a smaller canvas of the same format. Initially Lavery took in a wider view of the riverside, giving correspondingly less details. The figures of the washerwoman and what may be her daughter have been drawn with the point of a sable brush, before being blocked in in solid slabs of opaque pigment, in the manner of the ateliers. Partly because the painter was not elaborating details of foliage, the spatial relationships in this smaller version seem clearer than those of the exhibited work'