Tricia Cusack considers past portraits of women readers that position them as independent thinkers and intellectuals
Over the long 19th century, the theme of woman as reader was often overshadowed in European art by an emphasis on her bodily appearance, displayed for the gaze of an admiring viewer. For example, in Auguste Renoir’s Woman Reading of 1895, the reading figure is clad only in an undergarment. Yet in Ireland, a number of portraits, often by women artists, show women absorbed in or paused from, reading, and the focus of the picture is the activity of reading. Sarah Cecilia Harrison’s Portrait of a Young Lady Reading is a carefully observed picture of an absorbed reader (Fig 5). The reader’s lips are slightly parted as she looks down at her book, as if she is reading to herself. She is seen in profile and there is no engagement with the viewer.
The ‘absorbed’ reading figure had a counterpoise in the ‘interrupted’ reader, who is not currently reading but who may hold an open book, often with a hand or finger marking the page. Portraits often included accessories that were deemed appropriate for the subject, such as a fan or flowers for women, or for male figures a globe or a gun, and this practice continued into the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, in portraits of women especially, a book became an increasingly common accompaniment. Irish examples of women absorbed in reading, or temporarily arrested from it, presented a new imagery, in which women were involved in their own imaginative worlds, without any reference to an admiring or judgemental viewer.
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