With the advent of novels as a literary genre since the second half of the XVIII century, reading slowly stopped to be a public practice, where someone used to recite poetry or epic poems aloud in front of an observing crowd or guests.
Although you may think it’s incredible, people haven’t been doing it all the time: sitting in their room or on the sofa, alone, reading a book silently (unless they were writing, learning or practicing) as a hobby.
As soon as novels became popular, people discovered that they could do it indeed, and an entirely new way to enjoy literature came to be. And along with that, a new subject for paintings was born.
Reading was an intimate moment for everyone who could afford a novel, a moment where you could be completely absorbed into a story, excluding anyone else from your thoughts and mind.
Such a fascinating moment to investigate the subject’s psychology caught in a reverie and show it on a canvas.
It was just you and the world beneath the page.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these photos of me as a 1859 governess making some time to read between a lesson and a child to scold. The dress is the “Fiordisalvia” day dress I made in 2017.
Paintings:
Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Young Girl Reading (c.1770)
Alfred Stevens: The reader (c. 1860)
Charles Louis Baugniet: The reader (c. 1860)
Robert James Gordon: La liseuse (the reader), (c. 1877)
Mary Cassatt: The reader (c.1877)
La Teiera di Alice 