This work entered the Istituto Bancario Italiano (IBI) Collection from a private collection in Milan, in 1987.

Datable to the 1820s, the painting belongs to the artist’s late production, which reprises a subject that was enormously popular in the previous century: Venice and its lagoon. It was here that Bazzaro sought out views with vibrant light effects or animated slices of life, like the one in this painting and in Fire! Fire! and Chioggia. The setting is Sottomarina, a ward of Chioggia: several women are gathered around a fountain either to fetch water or to do their washing; the lagoon stretches away in the distance, lit by a sky at sunset.

The subject is taken from the life of common folk, whose situations and traditions were explored by Bazzaro and also by other exponents of Lombard Naturalism. As in Chioggia or Fishermen in Chioggia the painter reworks themes he had treated several times in paintings of the previous decades, fixing on the canvas fleeting impressions of his now distant sojourns in Chioggia.