Describing John White Alexander's work in Paris, Mary Anne Goley has written, "Among the group with which Alexander was familiar, suggestion rather than statement, evocation rather than description, were basic premises in the creation of works of art. Mallarmé, whom Alexander knew, was certainly the spokesman most representative of this attitude, which was as valid for the visual arts as for poetry. In fact, poetry and painting, and for that matter all the arts, were thought of as deriving from the same aesthetic impulse. This idea had been much in evidence since the 1850s, when it was first developed by Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, but it took on a renewed intensity in the 1890s. Alexander's paintings of women from this period were recognized as being very much part of this essentially symbolist attitude." (M.A. Goley, John White Alexander, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., 1976, n.p.)

According to a label on the reverse of the painting, Jesse Steele Reading is a sketch of one of John White Alexander's models and was presented to Lady Thumberton of Edinburgh, Scotland on the occassion of her marriage in 1902 to the Hon. William Watson. The painting was known in Lord Thumberton's family as 'Jesse Steele' because of its likeness to a Jesse Steele who served as Lord and Lady Thumberton's cook after their marriage.