La Liseuse

A young woman sits reading beside a table, an open book in her right hand, her head bowed in quiet concentration — and on the table before her stands a bust of the blind Homer. The sculpture recurs in several paintings of the period: Homer’s works had become far better known since Anne Lefebvre-Dacier’s celebrated prose translation (1699–1708), and the presumed portrait bust of the poet, brought back into fashion by Pierre Puget’s marble copy of 1693, had become one of the favourite motifs of the “Anticomania” of the last third of the eighteenth century. This small oil on panel, one of the intimate cabinet pictures the Cognacq-Jay collection preserves, couples the reading woman with that emblem of antiquity in a quiet meditation on the sources of inspiration. The painting is held in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, le goût du XVIIIe.