Lezend meisje 1865 - 1913

Bramine Hubrecht made this pencil drawing titled ‘Lezend Meisje’ – or ‘Reading Girl’ – at some point in the late nineteenth century. It depicts a girl, probably in her early teens, lying on her side, perhaps resting as she reads. Hubrecht was Dutch, and came from a family that valued education for women. But in the Netherlands, as elsewhere in Europe at this time, access to education and cultural life was far from equal. In the 1880s, when Hubrecht was starting out as an artist, the Dutch women’s movement was campaigning hard for better access to education and employment, and against the strict social codes that limited women’s freedom. In its intimate, informal style, this drawing seems to offer a quiet challenge to those codes. It captures a moment of contemplation, a young woman engaging with the world through literature. To fully appreciate its significance, we might turn to feminist histories of the period, and explore the biographies of women artists and intellectuals. By doing so, we start to understand art as something embedded in a specific social and institutional context.