The painting is actually by Hans Thoma, not Hans Toma. It struck my fancy, and I searched on the World Wide Web for an electronic copy. I couldn't find one, but I did find two other paintings of readers by Hans Thoma that I liked equally as much:


"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

