Interpretive Resource

Manet sold The Reader to the art collector and opera singer Jean Baptiste Faure in 1882, just three years after it was painted and one year before the painter’s death. For this, his most freely painted composition of modern life on the streets of Paris, he chose to represent a well-dressed young woman alone at a public cafe. She has ordered a demi or glass of beer, and sits quietly absorbed in the illustrated magazine she has just selected from the rack of journals that were available to patrons of the cafe. Her face is painted with Manet’s characteristic bravura brushwork; it seems almost "whipped up" with a dozen or so strokes of paint. Liberal amounts of primed canvas shine through so that the painting reads as a sketch.

It seems that Manet here mocked his model’s intelligence, for there is nothing expressive about her face, and he has made it quite clear that her magazine is filled with pictures instead of text. Indeed, she looks rather than reads. By focusing the young woman’s attention on such prosaic reading matter, Manet seems to have been poking fun at the tradition of painting solitary female readers or muses. How far she is from the pensive woman in Corot’s Interrupted Reading, also in the Art Institute’s collection and painted less than a decade earlier. Even Mary Cassatt’s resolutely intelligent Woman Reading, included in the Impressionist exhibition of 1879, has a much different sensibility than Manet’s thoroughly modern young woman, which was painted in the same year.

Manet’s Reader has no time for musing. In fact, she is clearly going to quickly finish both her beer and her magazine. She is warmly dressed and gloved, suggesting that the temperature is cool and that the garden view behind her is a painted backdrop. More-over, the shapes on the cover of her magazine almost seem to represent a figure walking on a windy day with a bird flying overhead. The cafe, like many in Paris, is probably insufficiently heated, and she has chosen to warm herself in the sun. In its style, The Reader is among Manet’s most Impressionist paintings. Its tour de force brushwork was clearly intended to convey the general characteristics of this Parisian scene as if viewed at a glance by passers-by and briefly imprinted on the mind. Our attention span as viewers is scarcely longer than is hers as a reader. We will pass on to other scenes (or other paintings) after viewing this brilliant illustration of modern life, and she will turn another illustrated page.