The Power of Music! is William Sidney Mount’s most famous work and has been so since he exhibited the original painting in 1847. The painting itself is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, but it was actually through reproductive lithographs like this, published by the French firm Goupil, that the work achieved its iconic status. The prints commanded quite high prices and had wide distribution in both France and the United States. This was one of a series that Goupil published of “characteristic” American scenes --- works that did much to set ideas about the patterns of life in rural areas of the United States.

Mount was an accomplished violinist as well as a painter, and he often achieves his greatest depth and subtlety in works that touch on music and its effects. Here, the acts of playing and listening --- always a game of insiders and outsiders --- take on even greater complexity than usual. This is partly because it is unclear whether the player and his companions are aware of the man who is listening to their impromptu concert, and partly because the player is white and the listener is Black.

Mount, who lived and worked in Stony Brook, on Long Island, took his neighborhood as his muse, so we know quite a lot about the people who posed for the painting. They were all friends of Mount, and all were known to each other through bonds of geography and, in the case of the older, seated white man and the standing Black man, by the name Mills. The white man is Caleb Mills and the Black man is Robin Mills. There is, in fact, a good chance that the white Mills family had enslaved the ancestors of Robin Mills. But a simple reading of the social structure that Mount’s picture seems to convey, with white insiders and a Black outsider, is subverted by the fact that Robin Mills possessed significant wealth and status in Stony Brook. He was, to a degree, playing a role in the painting that he no longer fully played in life, at least in economic terms.

All of this is complicated further by Mount’s own tangled beliefs about slavery and race, which were highly inconsistent; he supported slavery, but also steered away from racist caricature in his work to a degree that is unusual in nineteenth-century American art. The work has many layers, though almost none of this complexity was known in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the image first became famous. Then, it was almost certainly seen as a picture of rural idyll and “orderly” race relations.

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