A painting cannot make a sound, yet for more than three centuries painters kept returning to music, a subject that exists only as sound. To show it, they needed something silent to stand in for it, and most found it in the player's hands and the face of a listener. At least one of their models, judging by his fingers, had never learned to play.
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How These Were Chosen
Music asks a painter for something a picture cannot hold. A chord lasts a fraction of a second, while a canvas keeps a single instant for good, so the painter has to choose that instant and make it believable: fingers pressing the strings, a hand about to pluck, the breath before a song.
The choice leaves little room for error, because anyone who plays sees at once when a grip is wrong. Many painters took such care that music historians now study their pictures to learn how instruments were built and held.
Painters also followed music wherever it was played. In the Italian palaces of the 1500s and 1600s, musicians belonged to the household of a prince or a cardinal, and painters worked beside them. In Dutch houses, a lesson at the keyboard gave a reason to set a man and a woman side by side. In nineteenth-century Paris, a piano in the salon announced a family's standing, and painters sat their own relatives down at it.
Every picture on this list catches music while it is being made, by a player whose instrument is painted clearly enough to be named. Paintings of silent instruments were left out. The order runs from the least known picture to the most famous.
12. James McNeill Whistler, At the Piano (1858 to 1859)
A small girl in white leans against a piano and watches her mother play. The mother, dressed in black, sits in profile at the keys, with a row of picture frames on the wall behind her.
The room is in London, in the Sloane Street house of Deborah Haden, and James McNeill Whistler, then a young American painter, was her half-brother. He began the canvas there over the Christmas season of 1858, with Deborah at the piano and her daughter Annie, about ten years old, beside it.
Whistler could have painted Deborah alone at the keys, as so many painters showed women practicing. What he added was a listener. The mother looks at her keys, the girl looks at her mother, and that small, still figure is the only sign the picture gives that the room is full of sound.
This quiet picture had a rough start. Whistler sent it to the Paris Salon of 1859, the great official exhibition of the French capital, and the jury turned it down. Another painter took it in. François Bonvin, a realist, hung it in his own studio, where, according to the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, Gustave Courbet saw it and was impressed. The following year, the Royal Academy in London accepted it.
At a Glance
Artist: James McNeill Whistler (1834 to 1903)
Painted: 1858 to 1859
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 67 × 90.5 cm (26.4 × 35.6 in)
Where to see it: Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati
11. Frans Hals, The Lute Player (about 1623 to 1624)
His fingers are a blur. A young man in a red cap plays a lute and grins, but his eyes have slid up and away from his hands, and the hands go on playing without him. Frans Hals painted him in Haarlem about 1623 or 1624, and by 1624 another painter had already drawn the composition and changed where those eyes look.