Curatorial Remarks:
Who wouldn’t prefer a newspaper to dirty dishes? Paintings of women reading newspapers were rare in the 1880s, and those featuring working-class mothers or maids even rarer. With few exceptions, newspapers were still the purview of men.
While he was an art student in Paris in the 1880s, Frederick Boston may have seen Mary Cassatt’s Impressionist portraits of her wealthy female relations reading newspapers. In the 1890s, Boston became a major figure on the Brooklyn art scene and served as the first art instructor at the fledgling Brooklyn Museum.