Compositionally and chromatically very refined, the painting deals with a subject very dear to nineteenth-century painting that often sees women as the protagonist: reading. Here a young woman, seen in profile, sits composure on a stone bench, intent on reading a small book. The sober setting consists of a terrace that opens in front of a door of which you can see the half-open shutter doors, while the hat and cape worn by the woman would seem to indicate a still cold season. Perhaps to be identified, according to Farese Sperken (2005), with La liseuse exhibited at the Exposition des Beaux Arts in Lille in 1866, the painting, before arriving in the Grieco collection, was part of the collection of the great conductor Arturo Toscanini . C. Gelao