Woman reading with a young girl (Mia Van Rysselberghe with her daughter Elisabeth ?)

Painted in 1899 and held in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, this image of a woman reading with a young girl — tentatively identified as the artist's wife Mia van Rysselberghe with their daughter Elisabeth — belongs to the intimate domestic subjects that run alongside the more publicly ambitious bathing figure compositions in his oeuvre. Van Rysselberghe married Maria (Mia) Monnom in 1888, and she and their daughter appear in several key works of the 1890s and early 1900s. The subject of a mother and child reading together carried strong cultural resonance in bourgeois France and Belgium: it enacted ideals of educated domestic femininity and the transmission of culture through the family unit. Van Rysselberghe's application of divisionist technique to a domestic interior subject demonstrates that the method was capable of intimacy as well as the grand chromatic ambitions of his sea-and-figure canvases.

Oil on canvas using mature Neo-Impressionist dot technique throughout. Interior light — softer and more diffuse than the Mediterranean settings of the bathing figure paintings — requires a more restrained palette while maintaining the characteristic warm-cool contrasts. The two figures are unified compositionally by the book they share, with the reading gesture providing a stable visual axis.