While Reading

In the fifties Mánes painted many small pictures in the spirit of the so-called Second Rococo - which tended to return to 18th-century sensualism and intimism with the use of colours and light. The Rococo element was noticeable not only in the subject of these paintings, but also in their form. In this somewhat humorous genre painting the artist used luminism and tiny colour reflexes to render this only sparsely lighted evening middle-class interior with a sleeping girl.