Girls Reading

Matthijs Maris's 'Girls Reading' (1885) depicts his characteristic female figure subjects in one of the most symbolically significant of private activities — reading as the engagement with the inner world of the imagination, the girls absorbed in their books creating figures of contemplation and inner life that suited his Symbolist vision. His depictions of reading figures placed him within the long tradition of the absorbed reader in Dutch and European painting while his specific atmospheric treatment transformed the genre subject into something approaching pure Symbolism.

Matthijs Maris renders the reading girls with his characteristic atmospheric dissolution — the figures' engagement with their books depicted through the quality of absorbed concentration visible in their postures and the downward direction of their gaze, while the heavy atmospheric ground of his late technique creates the dreamlike quality that characterized all his figure subjects. His heavily worked surface and the figures' partial emergence from the atmospheric ground gives the subject its distinctive Maris quality.