Description
Girl at the Piano – The Overture to Tannhäuser
Girl at the Piano is an early work showing the painter’s two sisters: one plays the piano, the other sews in the background. The title refers to Wagner’s overture to the opera Tannhäuser. The canvas is held by the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this domestic scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
Wagner in a provincial drawing room
Cézanne, together with his friend Émile Zola, was an enthusiast for Wagner, who in the France of the day was thought both contentious and modern. The title is therefore not a description of the scene but a statement of taste: into a bourgeois drawing room in Aix the painter set a name that then stood for artistic revolt.
Patterns that take over the scene
The most unusual part of the painting is not the music but the wallpaper and the armchair cover. The floral patterns are painted so emphatically that they compete with the figures – Cézanne did not subordinate the background to the sitters but treated every plane as equal. That is an early sign of his later method.
What you see on the canvas
On the left stands the dark case of the piano with the girl in a white dress beside it; on the right, in a red armchair, a woman in dark clothing sits with sewing in her lap. The original is painted in oil on canvas, by the collection’s record measures 92.5 × 57.8 cm and was made around 1868.
The collectors who brought Cézanne to Moscow
Girl at the Piano belongs to the group of Cézanne’s works that entered Russian museums from private hands. Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, both Moscow textile industrialists, assembled between 1900 and 1914 the most advanced collections of French painting in the world – at a time when the same painters were still contentious in Paris and all but unknown in London. After the nationalisation of 1918 the collections became state property; today these works are divided between the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Music in a family drawing room
The floral patterns of the background are painted as emphatically as the figures – which is why we paint this subject by hand, with a brush, and never run it off as a print. Available in ten sizes, or to your own measurements. The broad horizontal format sits well above a chest of drawers or a piano. Try the frame in our app’s 3D preview. Among our reproductions of famous paintings you will find Cézanne’s other domestic scenes: Boy in a Red Waistcoat, Boy with Skull and The Card Players (Metropolitan).
- Subject: Girl at the Piano (The Overture to Tannhäuser), Paul Cézanne, c. 1868, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: the models were the painter’s sisters, and the title invokes Wagner – then a badge of artistic revolt
