About this work
A figure absorbed in her own world, sealed off from the viewer entirely — that is what Degas delivers in *Woman Reading (Liseuse)*. Made around 1885, the work is a monotype in black ink on cream laid paper , measuring just under fifteen by eleven inches. The woman's form emerges from an enveloping darkness, rendered not by the addition of marks but by their careful removal. Degas worked in the "dark-field" method — covering the entire surface of the printing plate in ink and then removing it as necessary to create the image. The result is a figure that feels conjured rather than drawn: soft-edged, luminous at the shoulders and hands, dissolving back into shadow at the margins. Rather than portraying the figure with precise facial features, Degas represented her in one of his favored modes of intimate anonymity. The tonal range is stark — deep velvety blacks against the warm cream of the paper — giving the work the quality of a memory half-retained.
This monotype belongs to Degas's first major campaign in the medium, a decade of sustained work from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, during which he composed contemporary urban subjects using black printer's ink.
Degas found monotype ideal for capturing secret and intimate scenes — and reading, like bathing or dressing, was exactly the kind of private ritual that drew him. He made images of women engaged in personal rituals that seem to carry an element of interior life closed off from outside observation.
In his monotypes, Degas is at his most modern — capturing the spirit of urban life, liberating drawing from tradition, and engaging the possibilities of abstraction.
The original is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. , where it has been exhibited as a cornerstone of scholarly understanding of Degas's printmaking output.
As wall art, this piece rewards a quiet room — a study, a library corner, a bedroom where reading is a nightly ritual. Its scale is intimate, its palette severe, and its mood one of absolute concentration. It featured prominently in the traveling exhibition *The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900* — a fitting context, because privacy is precisely what it embodies and what it offers. The viewer who responds to it is one who finds something recognizable in the woman's posture: the way the body curls inward around a book, the way the rest of the world recedes. Images like this seem to emerge from shadows; at times, you think you're looking at an uncanny memory. It belongs on a wall that doesn't demand attention — one that earns it.
