Attributes of Music

The red velvet bag trimmed with gold lace at the front of the table belongs to a musette, a small bagpipe filled by a bellows strapped under the player's arm instead of by the breath. In 18th-century France it was a fashionable instrument among the nobility, who played pastoral airs on it and liked to picture themselves as shepherds. Around it Vallayer laid out a whole concert. A mandolin leans against a music stand hung with open sheets of music, a violin lies across the blue cloth, there is a flute, the brass bell of a horn at the left, and a candle in a bracket for playing after dark. A pale blue ribbon is tied to the mandolin's pegbox.

She signed and dated it halfway up on the right, 1770, the year she gave it, with its companion on the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, to the Royal Academy as her reception piece. It stayed with the Academy, which met in the Louvre, until 1793, when the Revolution abolished the academies and the state seized their collections. The canvas was later sent to the palace of Fontainebleau, and it came back to the Louvre only in March 1889.