Arab Musicians (1864): Art, History and Details

Arab Musicians (1864) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Ludovico Wolfgang Hart (British).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Taken to catalogue and document cultural practices, both of these photographs were intended as portraits of professions or ethnographic types rather than portraits of individuals. Hart’s image was part of his subscription series Universal Gallery of Peoples, which sought “to reproduce through photography the national costumes that are disappearing rapidly before the advance of civilization, to preserve for people the flavor, and for artists the memory of what once was beautiful and picturesque.” An unidentified photographer captured the picturesque pifferari, country musicians who wandered European cities around Christmas playing before images of the Virgin and on the streets. They were a common theme for French and Italian painters and photographers in the 1840s and 1850s.

Object facts

• Title: Arab Musicians
• Date: 1864
• Creator attribution: Ludovico Wolfgang Hart (British)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 21.9 x 17.9 cm (8 5/8 x 7 1/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1995.236

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.