Woman Reading in the Studio

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

National Gallery of Art

A pale-skinned woman sits at a table leaning over an open book in a brightly lit room in this loosely painted, horizontal scene. The woman is shown from the knees up, and she sits in the center of the picture with her body angled toward the table to our right. Her wavy, chestnut-brown hair is short or pulled back to either side of a center part. She wears a white shirt under a fern-green jacket. The sleeve on the arm closer to us has slipped down over her shoulder. The portion of her skirt we can see is pale peach with plum-purple stripes. She sits on a wooden chair with a curved and possibly upholstered rust-red back. She rests one elbow on the table and her cheek on that fist. She holds open the pages of a book with her other hand, at the edge of the brown table. The room beyond her has walls and possibly works of art painted with swipes of golden yellow, warm caramel, and dark brown. At first glance, a painting of a landscape could be mistaken for a window on the back wall, but then we notice the tall legs of the easel holding it. The artist signed the lower right, “COROT.”