IN 1904 THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS in London exhibited a compelling painting of Beethoven by the German artist Carl Bernhard Schloesser, featured as an engraving on our cover. Unlike portraits of Beethoven executed during his lifetime, which tended to capture him looking back into the eyes of the painter, Schloesser's image of ‘Beethoven in His Study’ (ca. 1885) presented the musician in the act of composing. Dressed in a long robe and seated at his Broadwood, he stares into the distance, as if absorbing inspiration or, perhaps, gauging the effect of a chord just struck. Surrounding the composer are books and piles of manuscripts. Indeed, taken as a whole, the scene echoes the reminiscences of the Baron de Trémont, who paid the composer a visit in 1809 and then recorded these impressions:

Schloesser's vision also features a large, open window at the back, allowing the scene to be naturally lit and suggesting that the artist was familiar with Johann Nepomuk Hoechlene's well-known sketch of Beethoven's Schwarzspanierhaus studio, made shortly after the composer's death in March 1827. Hoechlene's image, of course, radiates emptiness, as it only could without Beethoven's presence. Schloesser's vision, by contrast, offers a scene rich in symbolism, even if romanticized. Behind the composer hangs a portrait of his grandfather Ludwig van Beethoven, an object noticed by other visitors to his quarters,2 and to the right of the keyboard rests a bust of a Greek figure, perhaps Homer, of whom the composer remained particularly fond. At the bottom of the frame a cello leans almost carelessly against a trunk, again surrounded by reams of manuscripts. Unlike Hoechlene's study, which casts the fortepiano as the central subject, Schloesser's image places Beethoven at the center, yet also affords the cello a position of significance (a violin, by contrast, lies all but undetected behind the ink well on the piano).