Liseuse

A woman in a dark dress and veil reads from an open book, the quiet pose and soft focus of the likeness giving the small canvas the air of an intimate domestic scene. Georges Décôte, a painter born in Lyon in 1870 who devoted his career to religious compositions, stained glass and portraits, exhibited this study of a reader in 1898, when the subject of the seated woman reading was a favoured motif of both academic and avant-garde painters alike. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.