Léontine Reading, painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1909, shows a young woman absorbed in a book, her head bent in concentration over its open pages and her dark hair set against a softly patterned interior. The brushwork is fluid and assured, the palette built on warm flesh tones, rose, and dusty creams in the manner of his late portraits. By this point Renoir was working into his final decade in the south of France, and quiet portraits of household sitters and models had become a steady current in his late practice. The picture distills a hushed reading moment into a luminous late-Impressionist composition.