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Many artists have used music as an inspiration for their work. Below we will examine some of the most famous music paintings in greater detail while also taking a look at the artist behind each work and what motivated them to produce these paintings.
- The Musicians (1597) by Caravaggio. The oil on canvas by the Italian master makes concrete on the pictorial support the vision of a pagan allegory, aimed to take shape in the likenesses of three young musicians dressed in the old-fashioned way, who find their place in a cramped environment.
- The Old Guitarist (1903) by Pablo Picasso. It is impossible to talk about the Old Blind Guitarist without referring to the blue period to which the masterpiece itself belongs, which can be traced back to a three-year time span from 1901 to 1904, and which is devoted to externalizing, through art, a profound grief that seized the artist, indelibly marked by the death of his friend Carlos Casagemas, a painter who committed suicide because of his unrequited love for the French model and dancer Germaine Pichot, the protagonist of many of Picasso's canvases.
- The Music Lesson (1662) by Jan Vermeer. Before analyzing the masterpiece dated 1662, it is worth explicating how music is a somewhat recurring theme in the work of Vermeer, a painter who interpreted this subject, one of the most iconic in Dutch Golden Age painting, within no fewer than twelve of the thirty-six works of art by his hand currently known.
- Music I (1895) Gustav Klimt. With Klimt we come to know a type of depiction of music, which, up to this point in the top 10, has been somewhat neglected, namely the allegorical one, rendered through the depiction of two main subjects: a woman holding a lyre and her counterpart, rendered in the guise of a sphinx painted on the right side of the stand, intended to represent that Egyptian mythological creature who, half-woman and half-lion, is able to unite in herself the polarity of the animal and spiritual worlds, as well as those of instinct and reason.
- The Last Supper – Leonardo da Vinci. “The Last Supper” is a masterpiece painted by Leonardo da Vinci between 1495 and 1498. The painting depicts the final meal that Jesus Christ had with his disciples before his crucifixion, as described in the Bible.
- The Starry Night – Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night” is one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous and beloved paintings. It was created in 1889 while van Gogh was staying at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France, and depicts a view of the night sky from his window.
- Guernica – Pablo Picasso. “Guernica” is a powerful anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso, completed in 1937 in response to the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
- The Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dali. “The Persistence of Memory” is a surrealist painting by Salvador Dali, created in 1931. The painting features a barren landscape with melting watches draped over objects, including a tree branch, a face, and a table.
- De sterrennacht (The Starry Night) – Vincent Van Gogh. The night sky was somewhat of a growing theme for Vincent Van Gogh in the late 1880s, and his paintings Cafe Terrace at Night and Starry Night over the Rhone both show hints of what is to come in this, one of his most famous paintings.
- Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Grand Jatte) – Georges-Pierre Seurat. This famous painting is a prime example of Seurat’s technique of Pointillism, which is an offshoot of Impressionism that uses simple dots of varying color grouped together in such a way so as to form a discernable image.
- Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead) – Arnold Böcklin. There are actually multiple versions of this work, but all generally show the same scene of a lonely island with a grove of cypress trees, and a small rowboat carrying forth a coffin and a mourning figure in white.
- Illustrations of Viktor Hartmann. Though these particular illustrations may not be among the most famous of artworks on their own, their eventual by-product in Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition certainly is.
- Fernand Khnopff: Listening to Schumann (1883) Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (1858-1921), quite a handful of a name, was one of the great leaders of the Symbolist movement.
- Oscar Wilde/Aubrey Vincent Beardsley: Salome (1894) The Western Europe arts scene was mad with Symbolism by the end of 19th-century. People began to dig into mythology, bible stories and the exotic, wild world, to write, paint and compose.
- Matthias Grünewald & Niclaus of Haguenau: Isenheim Altarpiece, (c. 1512-16) and Paul Hindemith: Mathis der Maler (1934) These two works are over four centuries apart, yet they are so intimately connected.
- Art deco poster by Ludwig Hohlwein. Richard Strauss attends a Berlin performance of Wilde’s Salome in November 1902. Immediately after the play, he has it translated into German.
Dec 16, 2023 · The enthralling intersection of art and music has yielded timeless masterpieces that echo the rhythmic cadence of the soul. From Whistler’s dreamy “Nocturnes” to Haring’s dynamic “Untitled,” each painting is a testament to the profound influence of music on artistic expression.
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Mar 10, 2023 · Stacker curated this list of famous paintings, delved into their hidden meanings, and examined the particular social and political contexts in which they were created.
