Madame Monet Reading (La Liseuse, 1872) — Renoir Postcard

Camille Monet sits in profile on a vine-covered terrace, lost in a small book while a hazy summer landscape opens behind her. Painted in 1872 and now held at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, "La Liseuse" shows Renoir at his most relaxed — reading as a kind of weather, well suited to a slow letter or a quiet desk vignette.