A Reading (or Woman in Windsor Chair)

We present today's painting thanks to High Museum of Art in Atlanta. I love it!

This is the first work by American Gilded Age artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing to enter the High’s collection. The oil-on-linen painting is an elegant example of Dewing’s signature style. A beautiful woman poses alone in a room. Through the model’s position—relaxed in a chair, lost in thought, an open book before her—Dewing gestures toward the absorptive sensation reading can inspire. The Colonial-era Windsor chair hints at the artist’s fascination with simple, harmonious forms.

Dewing’s classic, ethereal style was well suited to the cosmopolitan tastes of many turn-of-the-century collectors. Top among them was the successful industrialist Charles Lang Freer, who would later establish the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Collection. Dewing also collaborated with some of the era’s most notable tastemakers, including the architect Stanford White, who designed exquisite frames for his friend’s paintings, including A Reading. White drew from historical patterns in classical Renaissance architecture to design frames that complemented the delicate, subtle surfaces of Dewing’s paintings. His frame for A Reading, with its low profile and textured detail, draws the eye to the painting and minimizes the amount of shadow cast upon it.