Manet sold Woman Reading to the art collector and opera singer Jean Baptiste Faure in 1882, just three years after it was painted and one year before the painter's death. For this, his most freely painted composition of modern life on the streets of Paris, he chose to represent a well dressed young woman alone at a public cafe. She has ordered a demi or glass of beer, and sits quietly absorbed in the illustrated magazine she has just selected from the rack of journals that were available to patrons of the cafe. Her face is painted with Manet's characteristic bravura brushwork; it seems almost "whipped up" with a dozen or so strokes of paint. Liberal amounts of primed canvas shine through so that the painting reads as a sketch.
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