Music

In November 1916 the trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts asked Sargent for some painted lunettes over the doorways of their new rotunda. He came back with a plan for the whole dome, its architecture, its plaster reliefs and its paintings, and they agreed. Music is one of four round paintings set high on the piers of that dome, each beneath a pair of youths modelled in plaster relief. A young girl in light drapery sits playing a violin, her bow raised and about to touch the strings. It is an odd instrument for a room built to honour the arts of Greece and Rome, since no ancient musician ever held one. The roundels were among the last pieces done, painted on canvas between February and October 1921 and then fixed to the dome. Thomas Fox, the architect who helped install the work, took care to record that Sargent painted every one of these canvases himself, without assistants.