Gentleman Reading a Newspaper, 1882

This small work is a characteristic example of the wealthy bourgeois as well as of bourgeois portraiture in the latter half of the 19th century. In a hall lined with paintings, statues, furniture, rugs, an elegantly dressed bourgeois has paused reading his foreign newspaper and smoking his cigar in order to look to the right, perhaps towards an invisible to us door. The painting is skilfully and meticulously executed, but it is of more interest to us here for its content and meaning than for its quality, although the latter is very high nevertheless.