Polite Music Gallery8-The Music Lesson, or The Governess

The Music Lesson, or The Governess

Richard Dadd (1817–1886)
The Music Lesson, or The Governess
1855
Pen and ink, watercolor and bodycolor over graphite

Skills at the keyboard were considered an essential accomplishment for a young lady in Victorian England, and the piano was a centerpiece of the bourgeois home. The splendid Broadwood grand piano represented in Dadd’s watercolor, similar to the one exhibited nearby, indicates a family of considerable wealth. A governess — usually, as in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a middle-class woman of small means — would often give her young charges piano lessons. 

This watercolor, however, is no ordinary representation drawn from life. In his early twenties, Richard Dadd was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the most brilliant artistic talents of his generation. In 1843, however, he began to show symptoms of insanity and tragically murdered his own father, believing him to be the devil in disguise. Dadd was committed in August 1844 to the state criminal lunatic asylum in Bethlem Hospital, London. He continued to paint and draw, however, and The Music Lesson was made in the hospital, presumably based on memories or images culled from the illustrated press. The drawing seems to allude both to a tension between expressive passion and polite decorum — which music could reveal in the amusements of the Victorian parlor — and to the potential friction between a severe governess and her ward. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1981.25.2575