A Musician by Albert Joseph Moore, ARWS (1841-1893). Oil on canvas, 10 1/4 x 15 1/4 inches. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Moore exhibited this small painting at the Royal Academy in 1867, no. 235. Allen Staley has suggested it may have been painted as early as 1865 but was borrowed back from its owner James Leathart because Moore had nothing else to show at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1867 (130). It depicts a male youth seated on a stool playing his lyre to two girls. It again features both classical and Japanese elements in its composition. The female figures look similar to figures from the east pediment of the Elgin Marbles, while the overall composition was inspired by an ancient Roman wall painting from Herculaneum that Moore studied in the British Museum. The Japanese fans and the leaves in the upper right show the influence of Japanese prints. A.L. Baldry has described the picture as: "The musician, a dark youth in a thin yellow tunic, is seated, bending forward over his lyre, while opposite to him the girls, fair-haired, and in yellow, rose colour, and white draperies, recline on a low seat before a white panelled wall. Above the panelling is a grey frieze, and the floor is pale red; on the right of the picture is introduced a purple iris in a glass vase, and on the left a pink azalea in a pot. The general effect of the picture is exceedingly luminous" (35). Asleson points out that Moore emulated the ancient Roman wall painting: "He retained the bipolar construction of the ancient work, distinctly separating the performance on one side of the canvas from the audience on the other. He reinforced the division through gender, so that, as in The Marble Seat, an active male figure on the left performs for a pair of passive females on the right. Moore also emulated the rough surface quality of the Roman painting and based its unusual, tertiary hues on its faded pigments" (92).
The painting reflects current thinking amongst proponents of the early Aesthetic Movement regarding analogies between the arts of painting and music. Asleson has expanded upon this theory:
The arrangement of lines and colours provides a pictorial equivalent to the unheard music of the seated lyre player, allowing the eyes to experience what the ears cannot hear. The architectural background – regularly punctuated by the geometric divisions of the white dado – provides the underlying rhythm, and the curves of the figures trace the lilting melody. Even the Japanese fans, strategically positioned at intervals along the wall, suggest the percussive emphasis necessary to complete Moore's musical phrase. It is "a sort of pictorial music drawn from a lyre of but few strings," the critic F.G. Stephens would later remark" (Asleson, 2000, 94).
There is a drawing in the centre compartment of a study entitled The Muses in the British Museum for Moore's illustration to John Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (museum no. 1900,0613.66) that echoes the composition of A Musician, but in the drawing the figure to the left is female rather than male. The book itself was published in 1868 by James Nisbet and Co., Edinburgh.
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
A reviewer for The Art Journal mistakenly interpreted Moore's work as an attempt to emulate the work of French painters like Jean-Léon Gérôme, the so-called Neo-Grecs, who were influenced by discoveries at Pompeii: "A. Moore is another of the artists who absolutely despise beaten paths. Yet his Musicians (235) comes more within prescribed limits than some of his larger works. Mr. Moore, in common with certain French painters, attempts the revival of classic subjects and styles. The endeavour is commendable, and, with a little more pain and study, there is no reason why Mr. Moore should not, with advantage, hold a sphere hereto unoccupied and neglected. [143]
The critic of The Illustrated London News recognized the similarity of Moore's work to that of James McNeill Whistler: "A little picture by Mr. A. Moore is in a somewhat similar key of grey colouring to Mr. Whistler's Symphony; but it shows appreciation of the noble purity of classical forms and 'motives,' though the style is flat, and has a certain clumsiness. It is called The Musicians (235), and represents a young Greek playing the lyre before two listening maidens" (519).
In The Athenaeum, Stephens also compared this work to Whistler's Symphony in White No. III:
With the works of Messrs. Mason and Whistler may be classed The Musicians (235), the contribution of Mr. A. Moore, painter of the charming Pomegranates and Apricots of last year. This assimilates with Mr. Whistler's Symphony in being a study in white, and combines with that the tints of yellow and pink. Two damsels are seated on a bench; to them a youth plays on a lyre. Mr. Moore has a rarer feeling for the harmonies of lines and subtleties of contour than Mr. Whistler; his idea of composition is of the highest; see the way in which the damsels' heads and limbs combine in curves in unison of exquisite grace and proportion; his feeling for beauty is far higher in its tone than that of ninety-nine painters in a hundred here; thus his mind – or, as we are accustomed to say, his "taste," which is mind working in Art – would, even if could at all conceive them, utterly reject the vulgarities of Mr. Whistler with regard to form, and never be content with what suffices to the other in composition. The damsels of Mr. Moore listen to the music of the lyre, and, with limbs and heads at ease, meditate its beauty. [677]
Related Material
- Albert Moore, Art for Art Sake, A Musician, and The Quartet, a Painter's Tribute to Music (Discussions and Discussion Questions)
Bibliography
Asleson, Robyn. Albert Moore. London: Phaidon, 2000. 92-96.
_____. "Nature and abstraction in the aesthetic development of Albert Moore." In After the Pre-Raphaelites. Edited by Elizabeth Prettejohn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. 126-28.
Baldry, Alfred Lys. Albert Moore: His Life and Works. London: George Bell and Sons, 1894, 34-35.
Barringer, Timothy J. Art and Music in Britain: Four Encounters, 1730-1900. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2006. 30-31.
Calloway, Stephen. The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. London: V&A Publishing, 2011. 71-72 & 282.
Cormack, Malcolm. Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1985. 162-163.
"Fine Arts. Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News L (27 May 1867): 519.
Hedberg, Gregory. "Albert Moore." The Victorian High Renaissance. London: Lund Humphries, 1978, cat. 71, 141-42.
Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 440.
Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art for Art's Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 110-12.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series VI (1 June 1867): 137-146.
Staley, Allen. The New Painting of the 1860s, Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. 130-31.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2064 (18 May 1867): 666-67.
_____. "Mr. Humphrey Robert's Collection. Modern English Oil Pictures." The Magazine of Art XIX (1896): 47.
Created 23 April 2007
Last modified 24 August 2026