Aesthetic Satires Gallery3-Music and Aesthetics

Music and Aesthetics

George du Maurier
“Music and Aesthetics”
Punch 74 (February 16, 1878), page 71 

George du Maurier trained as a painter but became one of the most successful comic illustrators of the nineteenth century, his work indelibly associated with Punch, the satirical magazine whose cartoonist he became in 1864. A keen amateur musician himself, du Maurier often alluded to the coming together of music and art in his satires on the pretensions of the Aesthetic Movement. In this case, a singer, “Madame Gelasma,” is accompanying herself on an upright piano decorated with a sunflower motif, in typical Aesthetic fashion. As she sings “one of Schumann’s saddest melodies in her own inimitable manner,” one of her audience bursts into tears. The humor is created by the view of the top of the singer’s head produced by the convex mirror positioned — again, in Aesthetic taste — just over the piano. The suggestion must be that the Aesthetic hostess is more interested in fashionable decor than in musical performance. 

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