The Power of Music

William Sydney Mount’s 1847 painting illustrates the uniting force of music as a throughline of humanity. It also depicts the inhumane, as the Black laborer is made to listen from hiding, ostracized from the white men singing inside. Shut out from white spaces due to segregation, many Black people were compelled to take what they saw and heard and make it their own. Black fiddlers were lauded for their exemplary talent; enslaved people played at plantation balls and free men and women up North performed on public streets.

Set in rural Long Island before the Civil War, Mount's complex painting presents an African American laborer listening intently to a fiddle tune enjoyed by white men. While a love of music unites the figures in a bond of shared humanity, the two races occupy different spaces--one inside, one outside, both separated by a barn door--effectively symbolizing the pronounced divisions in America at the time.