Walk through almost any museum of European painting and you'll meet her again and again: a woman, alone, absorbed in a book or a letter. She doesn't look at us. She's somewhere else entirely, and that's exactly what makes her so fascinating.
A few women reading worth meeting
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading (around 1770, National Gallery of Art, Washington). A girl in a bright yellow dress, a cushion behind her, holds a small book in one hand. Fragonard painted it with quick, sweeping strokes, as if he too was in a hurry not to disturb her. - Camille Corot, Woman Reading (1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A woman sits in a soft landscape by the water, her head bent over her book. The whole countryside seems to wait for her to turn the page. - Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (around 1657–59, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden). Light pours through the window onto the page and the young woman's face. - Vilhelm Hammershøi painted his wife Ida reading in their pale, quiet rooms in Copenhagen, often from behind.
Why painters kept coming back
Reading was, for a long time, one of the few activities in which a woman could be seen alone and absorbed in her own inner world. A woman reading isn't posing. She's thinking, feeling, traveling. The painting lets us watch someone have a private experience, and that is endlessly moving.
There's also something deeply calming in these images. Nothing happens except attention. They show what slowness looks like.
Become the woman reading
Choose a quiet corner with good light: by a window, ideally. Pick up a paper book or a letter. Read for twenty minutes without your phone. Notice your posture, the light on the page, the silence around you. For a little while, you're the subject of the painting.
Something to read by the window
The Letter & Magazine subscription brings a letter and a postcard to your mailbox every month, with a meditation and a story about art inside, plus a seasonal issue of "(meditating) On Art". Words written to be read slowly, in good light.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi