The Power of Music (1847): Art, History and Details

The Power of Music (1847) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Sidney Mount (American, 1807–1868).

The work and its context

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

Set in rural Long Island before the Civil War, Mount's complex painting presents an African American laborer listening intently to a fiddle tune enjoyed by white men. While a love of music unites the figures in a bond of shared humanity, the two races occupy different spaces--one inside, one outside, both separated by a barn door--effectively symbolizing the pronounced divisions in America at the time.

Object facts

• Title: The Power of Music
• Date: 1847
• Creator attribution: William Sidney Mount (American, 1807–1868)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 67 x 78 x 7.5 cm (26 3/8 x 30 11/16 x 2 15/16 in.); Unframed: 43.4 x 53.5 cm (17 1/16 x 21 1/16 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1991.110

A detail from the museum

Mount was an accomplished fiddle player and even patented a new design for the instrument.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Board of Management Minutes, Jan. 8, 1881, Century Association Archives, New York, NY.
• Bruce Robertson, “’The Power of Music’: A Painting by William Sidney Mount,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79.2 (Feb. 1992): 38-62.
• Bruce Robertson, “’The Power of Music’: A Painting by William Sidney Mount,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79.2 (Feb. 1992): 38-62.

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.