Woman reading

It felt decadent. It felt grand.

I sat crossways in my rattan chair, legs hanging over the chair’s left arm, feet propped on the windowsill. With the window raised, the breeze tickled my toes. The afternoon sun warmed them.

Most of the day, I’d sat reading. Turning each page, starting each chapter, I faced a mini-skirmish within. “Get up and do something!” the antagonist demanded.

“I am doing something,” came the insistent reply.

“If only an artist would happen by,” I thought. “Then I could pose in reading mode, and the antagonist within me would relax.” When you’re suitably employed as a model, you’re not wasting time.

The pose-for-a-painter idea – brilliant, if improbable, since the rattan chair sits in an upstairs home office – came from my 2008 engagement calendar, The Reading Woman, published by Pomegranate Communications. This lovely calendar dedicates entire pages to reproductions of paintings and quotations from books – all portraying women reading.

Authors as varied as Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Roosevelt and the French mystic Madame Guyon weigh in. Other quotes spring from such familiar works as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Eudora Welty writes: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.” Kylie Tennant announces: “She would read anything from a dictionary to a treatise on turnips. Print fascinated her, dazed her, made her good for nothing.”

Ah, but the paintings intrigue me most. A sampling of titles doesn’t begin to convey the variety of women, poses and artistic styles rendered: Reading, Woman Reading, Young Girl Reading, Woman Reading a Letter, Woman Reading in a Sunlit Room, Woman Reading by Candlelight, By Lamplight, At the Window, Reading on the Terrace, Two Women Reading in an Interior, The Reader, The Reader Crowned with Flowers – and my personal favorite: A Woman Reading near a Goldfish Tank.

The distinguished artists who painted these works were English, Scottish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Austrian, Australian, Russian and Ukrainian. How interesting that so many artists hailing from such different places and periods found so much delight in capturing on canvas a woman reading. How telling that none of the artists lives today.

With the bulk of the works more than a century old, the latest was painted in 1939 by Australian Gwendolyn Grant. Titled Winter Sunshine, it pictures a young blonde woman in sunsuit reading outdoors.

Every stroke, every picture illustrates a quote attributed to Henry Miller: “We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”

Luxuriate. Sounds decadent, doesn’t it?

Maybe that’s why contemporary US artists have trouble catching contemporary US women reading.

The day I did so, my antagonist within repeatedly reminded me of the rules: Reading, if done at all, should be relegated to waiting times in doctor’s offices, school parking lots and beauty shops – or to the moments just before you nod off, exhausted, to sleep.

I had other things to do that day – yet could not do them. I needed to break some rules.

Romans 12:2, The Message, urges, “Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.”

Pressed in spirit, I knew God wanted me to spend the day doing what my cultural bias labeled “Good for Nothing.” I needed what Edmund Leighton identified in the title of his painting of a woman reading in an English garden: Sweet Solitude.

And thus did I luxuriate. #

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.