Items18The creator’s order
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Portrait of a MusicianThe 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…0 - 2
The Peasant DanceBefore 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…0 - 3
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…0 - 4
Self-Portrait as a Lute PlayerLute-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…0 - 5
The Music LessonA 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…0 - 6
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…0 - 7
The Jolly FlatboatmenAmerican 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…0 - 8
The Spanish SingerGuitarists 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…0 - 9
The Orchestra at the OperaThe 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…0 - 10
El JaleoThe 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…0
