Reading (1888)

Berthe Morisot’s Reading places a young reader beneath a great fan of palm leaves. Her head inclines towards an open book; yellow wicker, blue window frames and restless green foliage surround her. The painting’s wide format gives this enclosure almost as much presence as its occupant. Painted in 1888, the oil on canvas belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, where it is also known by its French title, La Lecture.^[1]

The subject is quiet, but the surface is full of movement. Short strokes run through the dress, light catches the chair, and long leaves sweep across the upper half of the picture. Morisot makes reading seem both private and physically situated: a person withdraws into a book while remaining immersed in the light, colours and textures of the surrounding world.

A reader surrounded by light

The reader occupies the lower centre of the composition, slightly to the right. Her pale face is seen at an angle, with eyes directed towards the pages and a small red accent marking her mouth. Golden hair gathers behind her head. The angle of her neck establishes the picture’s principal action before we have examined the book itself: she is looking down, attending to something that does not include us.

Her hands bring the book forward from her body. The open pages form a light, irregular shape above the lower edge, where the painting cuts through her seated figure. We cannot read a title or decipher the text. Morisot gives us enough information to recognise the activity while leaving its contents inaccessible. This small gap matters. The viewer can inspect the room and the reader’s posture, but the experience of reading remains hers.

Her dress has a relatively high neckline, fitted sleeves and a pale ornament at the chest. Its grey, blue and warm brown passages change as the strokes cross folds and seams. The clothing appears substantial enough to distinguish the figure from the yellow chair, yet its edges repeatedly loosen into nearby marks. A sleeve can be followed as a sleeve and then enjoyed as a run of light paint. Morisot allows recognition and painterly invention to remain active together.

The chair behind her is a particularly effective partner for the figure. Its bright back rises beside the head and shoulder, supporting the reader visually as well as physically. Near the lower right, its curved construction makes an open loop against the warmer wall or panel beyond. Another piece of wicker furniture enters from the left edge, partly cut off. These incomplete furnishings suggest that the place continues outside the painting. They also bring a light, open framework into a scene already crowded with leaves and strokes.

Is she indoors or outdoors?

The setting has the character of a conservatory or glazed veranda. A dark blue upright rises near the right side; beneath it, a lower frame runs across the picture. Beyond and around the glass, broad leaves and slender palm fronds fill the space. The architecture is visible, but a straightforward division between room and garden is difficult to maintain.

This uncertainty is productive. The upright gives the eye a firm line to hold, while the foliage keeps drawing it sideways and back. A patch of blue may seem to open a passage into distance, only for a nearby cluster of green strokes to bring attention to the surface again. The reader’s body provides a stable centre within a setting whose depth is less settled.

The Musée d’Orsay’s 2019 exhibition placed this painting in its section on windows and thresholds. The accompanying essay describes Morisot’s interest in spaces where interiors and gardens interpenetrate, and where glazing filters natural light. Such places offered her opportunities to combine the human figure with vegetation and to construct unusually complex views.^[1] That account helps explain why the surroundings here are so insistent. The window is an active part of the composition, shaping both the light and our sense of where the sitter is.

Look at how little clear sky Morisot needs. The impression of brightness comes largely from pale touches threaded through foliage, yellow furniture and the illuminated face. Light feels dispersed throughout the enclosure. There is no single large, empty background against which the figure stands. Instead, she is held within an environment that seems to sparkle around her.

The palms create an atmosphere of warmth and shelter. Their spreading leaves form an overhead canopy, while the window frame keeps the scale domestic. The setting combines the protective intimacy of a room with some of the visual excitement of a garden. Its exact location is not established by the sources cited here, but the painted relationship between leaf, glass and figure gives the place a strong character.

Jeanne Bonnet and the work of posing

Marie-Louise Bataille and Georges Wildenstein’s 1961 catalogue identifies the sitter for this La Lecture as Jeanne Bonnet. Their entry is number 219, under 1888, and its accompanying plate reproduces the same horizontal composition with the palm fronds and wicker chair. The entry also connects the oil to a pastel study, catalogued as number 528.^[2]

The identification changes how we understand the scene. A person performing an everyday activity can also be a model participating in the making of a painting. The finished picture does not reveal how the pose was arranged, how often it was repeated or what conversation may have accompanied it. The catalogue gives the reader a name, but it does not license a biography of her reading habits or an account of her feelings.

The pose itself is persuasive because it concentrates attention so efficiently. The bowed head, hands and book form a compact sequence. The chair and clothing supply a framework around that sequence, while the background expands into a much busier field. Morisot could therefore paint an activity that looks absorbing without making the whole image visually still. The sitter’s concentration and the painter’s movement operate at different speeds.

Naming Jeanne Bonnet also helps place this reader within Morisot’s varied cast of sitters. The artist painted relatives, including her sister Edma and her daughter Julie, as well as models. The specific identification recorded for this canvas allows the young woman to retain an identity of her own.

Colour, brushwork and a related pastel

Green occupies much of the upper half, but the greens vary continually. Yellowish strokes catch the leaves; cooler blue-green marks suggest shade; dark lines establish stems and window structure. Their changes keep the foliage from becoming a single flat mass. At the same time, the repetitions of narrow leaves create a patterned screen immediately behind the reader.

Below, yellow, ochre and reddish brown become more prominent. These colours move among the wickerwork, the reader’s hair and the lower surroundings. Blue crosses this warmer region in the frames and clothing. Morisot does not simply divide the painting into a green top and a brown bottom: she passes small reminders of each area into the other, binding the composition through recurring touches.

The face has a special role within this colour structure. Its light, relatively continuous shape offers a place to rest after the broken marks of the background. The brighter hair helps the head remain legible against the palms. The reader is therefore integrated into the busy setting without disappearing into it. The book supplies a second pale focus lower down, directing attention back towards her hands.

The recorded pastel study adds a material dimension to this lively surface. Bataille and Wildenstein explicitly list it as a study for the oil and identify Jeanne Bonnet in the pastel entry too.^[2] Their cross-reference establishes a relationship between works in different media, although it does not document every stage of the painting’s development.

Morisot’s broader use of pastel became especially significant during the later 1880s. The Musée Marmottan Monet’s 2023 exhibition explained how she used the medium to work out compositions and colour harmonies, connecting this practice with her interest in eighteenth-century artists. Its curators emphasised the way preparatory work could help produce the appearance of spontaneous painting.^[11] Reading has an object-specific connection to that practice through its related pastel. Its animated handling can be appreciated alongside evidence of preparation, without assuming a precise sequence that the surviving catalogue entries do not provide.

Three different paintings associated with reading

Morisot returned to readers across her career, and a familiar title can conceal very different pictures. Her Reading of 1873, in the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows Edma sitting on a shawl in a meadow, wearing a white dress. A parasol and fan lie on the grass. Cleveland also records an alteration revealed by X-ray examination: Morisot changed Edma’s eyes from an outward gaze to one directed towards the book.^[5] That technical finding concerns the earlier canvas.

The comparison makes the 1888 composition more distinctive. In the meadow picture, the reader sits low in the landscape and her white clothing spreads across the grass. In the later painting, a chair raises the figure and the glazed enclosure supplies strong verticals. The palm leaves build a dense background close to her head. Both pictures concern concentration, but the later one places it within an intricate framework of domestic objects and vegetation.

There is a third work to keep in view: The Mother and Sister of the Artist, painted in 1869–1870 and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. This upright double portrait shows Morisot’s mother reading beside Edma. The National Gallery lists its possible appearance in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 under the title La Lecture, retaining the qualification that this identification is uncertain.^[12]

These works demonstrate why a title alone cannot settle a painting’s history. The family grouping in Washington, the meadow reader in Cleveland and the conservatory reader in Florida belong to different moments and have different compositions. The 1888 painting’s sitter, related study and collecting history need to remain attached to this particular horizontal canvas.

From private collections to Florida

The 1961 catalogue records the painting in the Fayet and Gabriel Thomas collections. It also lists exhibitions in 1896, 1905 and 1919, under numbers 22, 3 and 29 respectively.^[2] These are historical catalogue records rather than a complete account of every later transfer. They show that a painting of private absorption acquired a public life through collecting and exhibition.

The Musée d’Orsay’s 2019 checklist names the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, gives accession number 1981.2 and records dimensions of 74.3 × 92.7 cm.^[1] The museum’s own Wild Creations & Women Artists guide includes La Lecture (Reading), dated 1888, and credits its acquisition as a museum purchase in memory of Margaret Acheson Stuart.^[13] These records locate the work in Florida, in the United States.

The painting rewards time spent on details that first seem incidental. The partly visible chair at the left, the blue upright beside the reader and the arching leaves each give the eye a different route through the enclosure. Returning from them to the book, we recognise how carefully Morisot has balanced competing kinds of attention. The reader follows the pages. We follow a painted world that continues to move around her.