Young Girl Reading

The reading woman was among Renoir's most persistent and personally satisfying subjects, recurring from the early 1870s through his final decade. Young Girl Reading at the National Gallery of Art, dated to 1888, belongs to his late 'Ingres period' synthesis, when the firmer drawing of the transitional years had settled into the relaxed assurance of his mature late manner. His interest in reading subjects has been connected to his family background — his father was a tailor, not an educated bourgeois — and to the cultural aspiration that literacy and its pleasures represented. The tradition of the absorbed reader in French painting extended from Fragonard's intimate book-reading girls of the 1770s through Corot's peasant readers to the Impressionist domestic interiors, and Renoir was consciously working within this tradition while transforming it through his Impressionist technique. The downward gaze of the reading figure creates an introspective, self-contained composition that gave Renoir the opportunity to observe a face without the social transaction of a returned gaze, and the reflected light of the white page on the face below it created interesting secondary illumination that he found technically stimulating. The NGA work is one of several reading canvases from this period that together demonstrate the sustained importance of the subject within his broader figure programme.

The girl's downward gaze and the white page of the book provide the compositional focal point, with Renoir concentrating his most careful modelling around the illuminated face and hands. The book reflects light upward onto the face, a subtle secondary light source that adds depth to the modelling. Background and costume are handled loosely to maintain the intimacy of the absorbed reading moment.