Music

Music from 1904, now in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, is one of Eakins's most considered late genre works — a fully realised painting of a violinist performing, developed from the earlier Sketch for Music. Eakins was a committed concert-goer and saw music-making as a paradigm for the kind of focused, disciplined intellectual-physical activity he most admired alongside surgery, rowing, and athletic competition. The finished Music painting is unusual in his late oeuvre for being a genre subject rather than a pure portrait, though the figure is treated with the same uncompromising realist attention he brought to every individual he depicted.

The challenge of depicting a musician in performance — capturing both the physical engagement with the instrument and the inner absorption of musical thought — drew from Eakins his most complex integration of figure and setting. The violinist's bow arm, the angle of the instrument, and the posture of concentration are all carefully observed and precisely rendered.