Reading Vemus: La Liseuse by Jean-Jacques Henner

Here is nice reading Venus in the delightfully redheaded form of La Liseuse ( The reader) by French painter Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905). We don't know exactly when he painted this but it was some time between 1880 and 1890. It is a lot looser and more informal than his earlier academic nudes. Henner was a great teacher and set up a special school for women painters in 1874, as they were not permitted to join the École des Beaux-Arts until 1897. Some of these women painters became his models. One of these was Dorothy Tennant, a talented painter in her own right, who had also studied under Edward Poynter. She later married the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and became Lady Stanley when he was knighted in 1899.