Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items18
1
Portrait of a Musician
The key to this portrait was hidden for centuries. A restoration in 1904 and 1905 stripped away overpainting and revealed what the sitter is holding: a sheet of music. Suddenly the intent gaze reads differently, less a pose for posterity than someone hearing a phrase in his head.
The panel was left largely unfinished, and nobody agrees on who he is; a Milan Cathedral choirmaster and a musician friend of Leonardo are the names most often proposed. That uncertainty is part of the appeal for musicians. This is a portrait of a working player, defined by his score rather than his title.
More about Portrait of a Musician2
The Peasant Dance
Before concert halls, this is where most people heard music: a village fair outside the inn, the church in the background, and a bagpiper with his cheeks puffed out, driving the dancers on. Bruegel puts the piper in the foreground beside a companion, so the music is the engine of the whole crowded scene rather than background noise.
Couples hurry hand in hand into the dance while others eat, drink and embrace around them. It is the best antidote on this list to the idea that old paintings of music are all about refinement; this is folk music doing its real job of getting a crowd moving.
More about The Peasant Dance3
The Lute Player (Caravaggio)
The Hermitage version, Saint Petersburg
Musicians love this one for a detail most viewers miss: the open part-book on the table is real music. The bass part has been identified as a madrigal by Jacques Arcadelt, Voi sapete ch'io v'amo, "You know that I love you," which tells you exactly what kind of song the young player is singing to his lute.
A violin rests beside the music, and the whole table reads like an ensemble waiting for its other members. Caravaggio painted the subject more than once, and in the Wildenstein version the music changes to songs by Francesco de Layolle on a text by Petrarch, so it pays to know which one you are looking at.
More about The Lute Player (Caravaggio)4
Self-Portrait as a Lute Player
Lute-playing women were a familiar type in paintings of this era, usually imagined by men. Here the painter is the musician. Artemisia Gentileschi casts herself as the lute player, fingers on the frets and eyes on the viewer, turning that type into a statement about her own talents.
Christie's suggested it was likely commissioned by Grand Duke Cosimo II de' Medici, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford bought it at auction in 2014, so American readers can see it without crossing an ocean.
More about Self-Portrait as a Lute Player5
The Music Lesson
A young woman plays the virginal with her back to us while a man stands listening. The trick is the mirror above the instrument: in it her head turns toward him, a glance we cannot see directly, and in the same reflection Vermeer lets the legs of his easel slip into view.
The lid carries a Latin motto calling music the companion of joy and the remedy for sorrow, and a bass viol lies unattended on the floor, as if a duet is either over or yet to begin. For anyone who has had a lesson that was about more than music, it is the most quietly charged room on this list.
More about The Music Lesson6
Mezzetino (Watteau)
Mezzetin was a stock lover of the Italian comedy, and Watteau sits him in a garden, strumming a guitar, singing and gazing up toward a balcony we never see. Behind him a statue of Venus stands with her back turned, the cleanest visual joke about unrequited love in art.
It is a small canvas, little more than half a meter tall, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it rewards close looking at the player's tense hands and upturned face. If you have ever sung for someone who was not listening, this is your painting.
More about Mezzetino (Watteau)7
The Jolly Flatboatmen
American river music in 1846: one man plays a fiddle, a younger one bangs on a pan for percussion, and a crewman in a pink shirt dances on the flatboat with his arms thrown up and his hair blowing. It is a two-man band with no stage but the cargo deck, and the whole crew is caught up in the tune.
The painting reached far more people than ever saw it. Members of the American Art-Union received prints of it, some 18,000 were circulated, and the canvas itself went to a lottery winner. It now hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
More about The Jolly Flatboatmen8
The Spanish Singer
Guitarists spot the problem at once. Manet's life-size singer plays left-handed on a guitar strung for a right-handed player, and his fingering suggests a model posing rather than a musician playing. It is a beautiful study of a performer's absorption that gets the instrument wrong.
None of that bothered Paris. This was the picture that got Manet into the Salon for the first time, in 1861; it was hung high at first and moved to a better spot because visitors liked it, and Théophile Gautier praised its bold brush while calling the sitter a guitarist from Montmartre rather than Spain. It has been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1949.
More about The Spanish Singer9
The Orchestra at the Opera
The view from the pit, painted for a player in it. Désiré Dihau, a bassoonist and composer, commissioned the picture, and Degas put him front and center at his bassoon. The cellist Louis-Marie Pilet is there too, and most of the fourteen musicians are portraits of the painter's friends.
The ballet the audience paid for is reduced to legs and tutus cropped by the top edge, which is exactly how a ballet looks from the orchestra. Painted around 1870 and now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, it is the definitive picture of what it is like to play for someone else's show.
More about The Orchestra at the Opera10
El Jaleo
The loudest painting on this list. A flamenco dancer swirls her skirts and stamps her feet while the men behind her sing and play guitar, and Sargent spreads the scene across a canvas almost 12 feet wide so the performance runs at full scale, left to right, like a dancer crossing the stage.
He showed it at the 1882 Paris Salon. Isabella Stewart Gardner later borrowed it and built a Spanish Cloister gallery in her Boston museum to hold it, with an arch framing it like a stage, and it is still there. Few paintings are installed as theatrically as the performance they show.
More about El Jaleo11
The Concert Singer
Singers will recognize the face: mid-phrase, mouth shaped around a vowel, body perfectly still. Eakins had the contralto Weda Cook sing an aria from Mendelssohn's Elijah over and over so he could study the movements of her throat, and some scholars read her mouth as forming the e of the word "rest."
The only other performer is a conductor's hand and baton poking in at the lower left, and the opening bars of the aria are carved into the wooden frame. It took nearly two years, from 1890 to 1892, and hangs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. No painting here is more precise about what singing physically looks like.
More about The Concert Singer12
Girls at the Piano
Practice, not performance. One girl in a white dress with a blue sash sits at the keyboard while her friend in pink stands and leans in over the score, and anyone who learned an instrument at home will recognize the shared concentration of working out a passage together.
Renoir finished it in 1892 as an informal commission for the Musée du Luxembourg, and the subject clearly held him: he painted three other oil variations of the composition plus two sketches. The version now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris is the one to see. It is the gentlest entry here, a reminder that most music happens in living rooms.
More about Girls at the Piano13
The Old Guitarist
Music as the last thing a person has left. A blind, emaciated street musician in Barcelona hunches around his guitar, and in a canvas drowned in blue, the large brown guitar is the only real shift in color, so the instrument becomes the warmest, most alive thing in the picture.
Painted in Picasso's Blue Period, it hides other work underneath: infrared imaging has found a young mother, a child and an animal beneath the surface. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago and is often linked to Wallace Stevens's poem The Man with the Blue Guitar. For anyone who has played for coins, it is the most honest picture here.
More about The Old Guitarist14
Music (Matisse)
Music reduced to its simplest terms: five figures, a strip of green hill, a field of blue, and the sound left to your imagination. One figure stands with a violin and another sits playing pipes, while the rest sit still and seem to sing or listen, and the stillness is the point. Where its famous partner Dance whirls, this one listens.
The Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned this wall-size canvas and hung it alongside Dance, and the pair were shown together at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1910. Both now belong to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. It is the purest image on this list of what it feels like to sit inside a sound.
More about Music (Matisse)15
Impression III (Concert)
A painting of one specific night out. In early January 1911 Kandinsky heard a concert of Arnold Schoenberg's music in Munich, including string pieces played by the Rosé Quartet, and this canvas is his response: a black triangle for the piano, a great flood of yellow for its sound washing over the hall, and the concertgoers as huddled shapes at the lower left.
It is one of the rare cases where a specific piece of music can be tied directly to a specific painting, and later that month Kandinsky wrote his first letter to Schoenberg, beginning a famous friendship. It hangs at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. Come for the moment abstraction learned to listen.
More about Impression III (Concert)16
Three Musicians (Picasso)
A trio built like a piece of music, in interlocking flat planes. Pierrot and Harlequin from the old Italian comedy sit beside a masked monk, and in the version at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Pierrot plays a clarinet while Harlequin plays a guitar, with a dog lurking under the table.
Picasso painted two versions in the summer of 1921 at Fontainebleau; the other, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has no dog and gives Harlequin a violin instead. Pierrot is believed to stand for the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the monk for Max Jacob, so the band doubles as a group portrait of old friends. Seeing both versions is like hearing two arrangements of the same tune.
More about Three Musicians (Picasso)17
Green Violinist
The village fiddler, larger than life. Chagall's green-faced violinist floats or dances above the small gray rooftops of a misty village, one foot planted on a house, a figure who in Hasidic life was a vital presence at ceremonies and festivals, where music and dance were a way of reaching God.
Painted in 1923 and 1924 after Chagall returned to Paris, it closely repeats a 1920 panel called Music that he made for the Moscow State Jewish Theater. It is often considered the inspiration for the title of the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, and it hangs at the Guggenheim in New York. No other painting here makes the musician the heart of a whole community.
More about Green Violinist18
Blues (Archibald Motley)
Jazz as a crowded room. Motley painted Blues in Paris in 1929, during his Guggenheim Fellowship, and packed the canvas with couples dancing close, brass instruments weaving in and out between the bodies, and the musicians echoing the dancers' shapes so the whole picture moves to one rhythm. Look for the single high-heeled foot in the lower right corner.
The club is thought to be Le Bal Nègre, a West Indian cabaret where African Americans, Africans, people from the Caribbean and white Europeans mixed freely. It is probably Motley's best-known painting, and it ends this list where music lives for most people now: a packed night out.
More about Blues (Archibald Motley)
