Stories for the Public, 1830–1860

William Sidney Mount (American, 1807–1868)
The Power of Music, 1847
Oil on canvas; 17 1/8 x 21 1/8 in. (43.4 x 53.5 cm)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund (1991.110)
© The Cleveland Museum of Art

A fiddle player himself, Mount firmly believed in the therapeutic "force of music," as he first entitled this painting. Two white men in a barn calmly listen to a white youth playing a melody. The music has also captured the attention of a passing black man, who puts down his axe and jug to lean against the open door and listen. The painting received rapturous attention when it was exhibited in New York City in 1847 even though viewers wondered how to read it. Did it portray the black man as lazy and easily seduced by the charms of music or did it dignify him? Mount deliberately left the answer ambiguous, just as it was in real life on Long Island, where he painted the scene and where African Americans, whether enslaved or free, resided and worked alongside their white neighbors.