The Reading Girl

The Reading Girl is an 1887 oil painting by the French-British painter Theodore Roussel. A nude young woman is shown sitting in a wooden chair reading with a kimono slung over the back of the seat. The sitter was the model Hetty Pettigrew, who a few years earlier had appeared in Jacobite-themed painting An Idyll of 1745 by John Everett Millais.
It was one of two work's Roussel exhibited at the New [English Art Club] in 1887.
This picture was described by Roussel's fellow artist William Orpen as the finest nude painting of the era. The painting is today in the collection of the Tate Britain, having been presented to the gallery in 1927.