Boy Reading (Portrait Of The Artist's Son, Willie)

Boy Reading (Portrait of the Artist's Son, Willie) by Samuel Peploe, dated 1903, depicts his young son Willie absorbed in a book — a domestic subject of quiet intensity that allowed Peploe to study the absorption of a figure entirely focused on something other than the painter's gaze. The reading child as a subject was enormously popular in bourgeois European painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, representing simultaneously the values of education and the private pleasure of literature. For Peploe, who was developing rapidly as a painter in the early 1900s, the familiarity of the subject allowed him to concentrate on purely pictorial problems: light, pose, the informal arrangement of a figure at ease.

Peploe handles the reading boy with a tonal freshness influenced by his Paris training, the indoor light falling across the child's bent head and open book with careful, observed attention. The palette is warm-toned domestic, with the book's pages providing the principal light area within the composition.