Reading Choirboy

A choirboy caught reading rather than singing. Louise Amans shows the boy off duty, seated in his robe with a book open in his hands, his head bent and his attention wholly on the page. It is a modest oil, about 55 centimetres tall, painted in the plain, close realism she had brought back from her training in Paris in the 1880s. The face and the hands get her steady attention, and nothing in the scene is dramatised. Amans died in 1897 at only 37, which left her surviving work small, and the Kunstmuseum Basel now keeps this canvas among the women painters of her generation.