When the seventy-two-year-old Corot showed A Woman Reading at the Salon of 1869, the critic Theophile Gautier praised its naivete and its color but criticized the faulty drawing of the woman, noting the rarity of figures in Corot's work. Although the artist had painted similar studies for about a decade, this was the first and one of the very few that he exhibited. Corot returned to the canvas soon after the Salon; he reworked the landscape but left the figure intact.