Fantasy on Faust

Gounod's Faust had opened in Paris in 1859, and by the mid 1860s its tunes were public property. Pianists built concert fantasies out of them, and the Catalan virtuoso Juan Bautista Pujol had written one of his own, which he played in public in Madrid in 1866.

That same summer Fortuny heard him play it privately, in the studio of the painter Francisco Sans y Cabot, and made this picture out of the evening. The canvas is small, 40 by 69 centimetres, and most of its width goes to a mahogany grand piano of the sort Pleyel and Erard were selling then. Pujol sits at the keys. Around him the music has produced its own audience: the garden scene from the third act of the opera, with Faust and Marguerite pale in the light, Mephistopheles and Marguerite's neighbour Marthe worked in darker paint, and a white owl flying low through the room. The museum's curators tie that owl, and the way the apparition shares the floor with the furniture, to Goya's print of the sleep of reason, which Fortuny admired.

Pujol kept the painting. It hung in his own collection in Paris, and it came to the Prado in 1904 with the bequest of the collector Ramón de Errazu.