A woman in a cream gown kneels at a small pipe organ and plays. A knight in dark armor sits on the grass at her left, looking up at her. At her right, a winged figure with a wreath in his hair rests his arm on the organ with his eyes closed: Cupid. Behind them are the roofs and tower of a medieval town at dusk, a green field with sheep, and a border of tulips and other flowers along the foreground.
Edward Burne-Jones began the picture in 1868 and finished it in 1877, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1947, says he associated the scene with his affair with the artist and model Maria Zambaco. The Met also notes that the figures are seductive in their mutual indifference: the knight watches the musician, the musician looks away, and nobody seems to be listening to anyone. The flowers along the border are meant to be flowers of love and of bitterness.
The first owner of the painting was William Graham, who also commissioned the Briar Rose series from Burne-Jones. When it was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1878, Henry James compared it to a Giorgione or a Titian. It belongs to the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic tradition of treating music as a model for painting, a form that works directly on the emotions without needing a story.
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