ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representation, including self-representation, of the musician and/or composer during the emergence and development of modernity in the eighteenth and, principally, nineteenth century. Portraits in oil mark the most prestigious form of visual representation to which any professional musician living during the early decades of modernity might hope to attain. The cultural stakes of the oil portrait were higher than for other media. Two musician portraits from the last third of the eighteenth century reiterate, although by means quite different from the Marais portrait, the established position of professional court players, in this instance in Bavaria. A nineteenth-century watercolor by the English artist Henry Stock entitled “A Musician’s Reverie”, representing aesthetic inspiration, helps clarify the paradigmatic sociocultural dialectics of the musician reimagined, erotically. The unstable social position of actual musicians challenged efforts to represent appropriately musicians of the imagination.
