Woman Reading

A fashionably dressed young woman reads a magazine at what seems to be a café table — the marble top, the beer mug, the paper attached to a wooden bar — though the floral background is in fact one of Manet’s own paintings and the “café” a re-creation in his studio. Painted only a few years before his death, Woman Reading is among the most Impressionist of Manet’s images, its quick, free brushstrokes and light colours capturing the fleeting modern moment he and his circle sought; the Café Nouvelle-Athènes where he held court on the rue Pigalle was the gathering place of Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Baudelaire and Zola. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.