Reading

Two women — one reading, one leaning near her — fill this broad, horizontally composed sunlit scene, a quiet moment of domestic reading set against a warm interior. The loose, feathery handling marks the work of Berthe Morisot, painted in 1873, three years before the first Impressionist exhibition in which she participated alongside the circle of Manet and Renoir. It exemplifies the intimate modern-life subjects to which she devoted her career and for which she is now counted among the finest painters of the Impressionist circle.