Dating from the extraordinary surge of creativity and artistic output that Matisse experienced in the late 1940s, La lecture, both recto and verso, belong to a series of drawings executed in 1947 as variations on the subject of two girls at a table in an interior with a window in the background at the upper right. These drawings are closely related to oil paintings from the same year, including Le silence habité des maisons, 1947, although the subject of the readers is one that goes back to the very beginning of the artist's career with La liseuse, 1894, which according to Pierre Schneider was the artist's first painting to include a figure after his initial experiments with still lifes.
In addition to the two variations on this theme represented on each side of the sheet, the shadows of a slightly different composition layered beneath the figures on the recto are tangible evidence of Matisse's working methods, which he descriped as multiplying 'constats', objective views, and analyses of his subject in a series of pencil, charcoal and oils, altering angles, perspectives and media 'to work on my subject until I have it sufficiently inside me to be able to improvise' (H. Matisse, quoted in P. Schneider, Matisse, London, 1984, p. 45).