ABSTRACT
There are two ways of looking at a painting with musical elements: as a work of art, or as a document on the practice of music; through the spectacles of an art historian or a musicologist. The corpus of British visual representations of the Other in the long nineteenth century is vast; in any study one must choose which subject-matter to examine and this investigation of visual culture focuses on representations of non-Europeans musicians. The art theorist John Dewey claims that the study of art is a useful approach to understanding a culture. Artworks including representations of the 'Orient' and the Other from nineteenth-century Britain make up a huge body of artistic work. As the production of the visual arts is culturally implicated, the ideas of the contextualizing culture can be expressed in and through the artworks themselves and in their reception at the time of production.
