Interpretive Resource

During the late nineteenth century, Parisian cafés were the gathering places of artists and writers and were ideal locations for observing the urban scene. Many Impressionist paintings depict the Café Nouvelle-Athènes on the rue Pigalle, where two tables were reserved for Edouard Manet and his circle—a group that included the painters Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, and the writers Baudelaire and Zola. The Reader is thought to be set in the Café Nouvelle-Athènes; Manet could well have passed by this fashionably dressed young lady on his way into the establishment. The illustrated magazine attached to the wooden bar that the woman holds would have been taken from the café’s reading rack. It is perhaps one of the popular French periodicals of the day in which Manet’s drawings sometimes appeared. The woman’s heavy clothing suggests that she is seated at an outdoor table and that the weather is cool. The colorful garden view behind her is thus probably a painted backdrop.

The Reader is one of the most Impressionistic of Manet’s paintings; the quick, free brush strokes and light colors are characteristic of his technique late in his career. Painted only a few years before his death, this work admirably captures a fleeting moment, the sense of a fleeting glance that the Impressionists sought to represent.