Femme Lisant is an aquatint executed by Pablo Picasso in 1948, depicting a woman absorbed in reading — a subject with deep roots in Western portraiture and one to which Picasso returned at intervals throughout his career, drawn by the particular quality of inwardness and self-containment that the act of reading confers on a figure.

The work is executed in pure line, without aquatint tone or tonal ground — the bitten line of the plate giving the image a crispness and delicacy that sits close to drawing. The figure is rendered with the economy characteristic of Picasso's finest work of this period: a few strokes establish the fall of hair and the angle of the head, the downward gaze indicated by the briefest suggestion of lids and lashes, the hands holding the open book described with slightly more attention as the focal point of the work. The striped pattern of the blouse, handled in rapid parallel lines, provides the only textural complexity in an otherwise spare image.

The subject is almost certainly Françoise Gilot, Picasso's companion from 1943 and the dominant presence in his work throughout the late 1940s. Where many of his portraits of Françoise from this period are frontal and confrontational, Femme Lisant catches the figure in an unguarded moment — absorbed, self-directed, her attention turned entirely away from the artist. It is among the most quietly observed of his images of her, and one of the most directly felt.

By 1948 Picasso had established himself at Vallauris and was producing work across painting, printmaking and ceramics with characteristic intensity. Femme Lisant belongs to a group of prints from the moment when the ambitions are deliberately modest — works that demonstrate, precisely through their restraint, the confidence and assurance of a draughtsman at the height of his powers.

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