Prova dell'orchestra Pasdeloup al Cirque d'Hiver

By 1879 Jules Pasdeloup had spent almost twenty years running cheap Sunday concerts at the Cirque d'Hiver, a domed amphitheatre in Paris, putting Beethoven and Wagner in front of audiences who could never have afforded the opera. Sargent, then in his early twenties and a keen amateur pianist, went often, and he painted the hall not from a good seat but from up in the cramped balcony, looking steeply down. The angle is what makes it. Musicians and their double basses tilt across the canvas, sheet music catches the light, and the whole scene is brushed in quickly, as if caught between two movements rather than posed.