And What If She Doesn’t Know How to Read?

And What If She Doesn’t Know How to Read?

The enigma posed by this painting, The Reading Lesson, by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch, is in the lady’s apparent distractedness (Richelieu, room 837, MI 1006). The child is learning to read. He ponders over the large, heavy volume that she—his mother? his nurse? his servant?—holds in her left hand. Entirely focused on his task, absorbed in the effort, he runs his finger along the line, spells the words out one by one. We only see the tuft of his red hair and a part of his face, the small round nose, the upper lip pursed to pronounce a nasal. She stares straight ahead, into emptiness, not at the child, not at the book, as if they meant nothing to her, as if she had no use for them. There seems to be no link between the woman and the child. And yet there she is, helping him hold the book; she takes up a good part of the surface of the painting, but what centers the composition is the book, its top edge—red, like the woman’s and the child’s hair—on which their hands nevertheless meet. Is this a simple genre scene, the depiction of the process of learning to read that we all went through, or is it an allegory of reading, of the discovery of the world through books? What the child reads to the woman makes her dream. But go figure who gave the painting its title. After all, with her absent-minded look, she might not know how to read.