Portrait of a Cellist

Musicians in 18th-century portraits were usually idealised, posed as gentlemen of taste with a sheet of music or an elegant gesture, their faces smoothed into an agreeable calm. The Kunsthistorisches Museum points out how far this canvas stands from that habit. Ceruti shows the cellist in an everyday moment, with an unvarnished, even slightly ordinary expression, and lets the man's own character carry the picture. The museum sees in it the Lombard approach to portraits in those years, a taste for plain, earthly realism.

It was painted in the 1740s. The sitter's name has not come down to us, only his instrument, which he holds with its bow. The canvas is a little under a metre tall, and the museum bought it in 1973.