Books, Bodies, Stage

I'm on a quest for pre mid-20th-century images of naked or undressed women -- women en déshabillé -- reading, or just lounging with books in the vicinity. (And if there also happens to be another version where she's making tea, that's even better!)

For thrills, check out this essay by William B. Warner of UC Santa Barbara. Here's his analysis of the two paintings above:

For critics of early modern novel reading were not just concerned about mimicry of a novel’s action; they were also alarmed about the perverse displacement by which the reader, through the repetitive effects of absorptive reading for pleasure, conducted in freedom and solitude, (in other words in the sort of autonomous erotic reverie the rococo encourages) might become a compulsively reading body. In a painting entitled "Reclining Nude" (figure 18; 1751; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum), Boucher uses another of Louis XV's mistresses, Louise O'Murphy as a model. Here, the open book to the left of the nude woman reclining on the couch suggests that the equivocal potential of reading novels for pleasure arises in part from a shift in location: one may read these books in the intimate undress of the boudoir. The novel in this setting functions as a stimulant, like tea in the samovar, which has replaced the novel in this rendering of the same model in the same pose in a painting of the same title (figure 19; 1752; Munich, Alte Pinokotk).