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Woman Reading

A young woman in a dark hat and coat with light ruffled collar sits reading a large periodical held up in her gloved hands. Flowers and foliage are suggested behind her.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • A young woman in a dark hat and coat with light ruffled collar sits reading a large periodical held up in her gloved hands. Flowers and foliage are suggested behind her.

Date:

1880/81

Artist:

Édouard Manet
French, 1832-1883

About this artwork

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 Édouard Manet and his circle—a group that included the painters Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the writers Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola.

At first glance, this fashionably dressed young woman appears to have been captured sitting at a favorite café: the marble tabletop, beer mug, and magazine attached to a wooden bar suggest such a setting, and her heavy clothing and kid gloves indicate that she is at an outdoor table and that the weather is cool. However, the floral background is actually one of Manet’s paintings and the café a re-creation in his studio.

Woman Reading is one of the most Impressionist of Manet’s images; the quick, free brushstrokes 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 modern life that Manet and his contemporaries sought to represent.

Status

On View, Gallery 201

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist

Édouard Manet

Title

Woman Reading

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1880–1881

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

Inscribed lower left: Manet

Dimensions

61.2 × 50.7 cm (24 1/16 × 19 7/8 in.)

Credit Line

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection

Reference Number

1933.435

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

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https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/14591/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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