Combining luminous color, staccato brushwork and academic drawing, Childe Hassam's The Sonata exalts sensory and aesthetic experiences. The painting features a pianist having just performed Beethoven's famously difficult Sonata Appassionata, a score for which she holds in her lap. Her slouched posture, suggesting that the performance has exhausted her, is echoed by the similarly beautiful but fragile-looking yellow rose atop the piano. A Japanese scroll showing a blossoming cherry tree also evokes dual pleasures of sight and smell.
A distinguished and unique work by Hassam, The Sonata indicates the painter's endorsement of a late-19th-century movement that proclaimed that art was not obliged to tell stories or to impart morals. Rather, art uplifted society by celebrating beauty.
