Her Woman Reading from 1879-84 is conventional, and is presumed to have been painted before her marriage in 1884, although it appears more consistent in style with some of her works from the period after her husband Thomas’s death. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Īlthough far less well-known than her husband, Susan Macdowell Eakins was an accomplished painter in her own right. Susan Macdowell Eakins (1851–1938), Woman Reading (1879-84), oil on canvas, 96.5 x 71.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Gift of Julius Rauzin, 1995), New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.īey learned his highly-detailed salon style under Gérôme and Boulanger in Paris, and The Scholar from 1878 is one of his better examples. Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), The Scholar (1878), oil on canvas, 45.5 x 90 cm, Private collection. In complete contrast, here’s one of Osman Hamdi Bey’s superb paintings which demonstrates that reading as devotion among religious scholars isn’t confined to Christians. I wonder if the woman is part of a ‘live peep show’, and passing the time by reading, perhaps, or just a prostitute in her booth in a brothel (although the bed seems rather small to accommodate any partner). It could just be dismissing the reading of novels by women as a morally dangerous activity, but it seems too elaborate for that.
This has all the elements of what later became the ‘problem picture’, a visual riddle which the viewer was invited to solve by building a narrative which fitted the various clues.
Beside her on the bed are several other books, and the hand of a horned figure is reaching up to those books from below and behind a curtain. Her clothing is hung on the foot of the bed, and a floral garland on the top of the mirror. Her bed is in a small compartment, a large mirror hanging above her lower body and legs. A shapely and completely naked woman lies on her back, a book held above her face, reading avidly. The Reader of Novels (1853) must be Antoine Wiertz’s most puzzling painting. Antoine Wiertz (1806–1865), The Reader of Novels (1853), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Le Musée Antoine Wiertz, Brussels.
These start with the strangest of all these paintings, a work which I struggle to read in any rational way. Among the motifs which became steadily more popular from the Renaissance is that of a woman reading, which is the thread through my next selection of paintings from the latter half of the nineteenth century. In yesterday’s article, the first of three looking at paintings with the theme of reading and the book, I showed examples from the late Middle Ages through to the Pre-Raphaelites in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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