Interrupted Reading

A young woman sits absorbed in her reading, a brown book held in her left hand, her left thumb marking her place as her head leans toward her right hand, her gaze lifted from the page. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted the picture about 1870, late in his career, when he had begun to turn from his renowned landscape manner to intimate figure scenes of this kind — women reading, daguerreotype-like in their stillness, painted with the same silvery light he had spent a lifetime mastering in the open air. The plain background, the unadorned room, the economy of the composition are a repudiation of the glossy genre scenes of the Second Empire; Corot, the most revered painter of his generation in France, here tells a little story of attentiveness and interruption with the same gravity he brought to his forests and riverbanks. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.