Catching the Tune — Michael Armstrong

William Sidney Mount is well known as America's first genre painter of international reknown. Born in 1807 in Setauket, Long Island, he lived and worked both on rural Long Island and in an increasingly urban New York City. Mount was widely recognized as an artist of great talent who had a special gift for depicting everyday scenes -- in his case, scenes of daily life on rural Long Island. His friends knew him not only as an artist but also as a talented musician. He played his fiddle for local dances or concerts, collected fiddle tunes and invented a violin that he called the “Cradle of Harmony” (illustrated p. 19) which he patented in 1852 and exhibited at New York City's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853.

Mount painted many pictures of musical subjects. One particular painting encompasses more of his artistic and musical interests than any of his other paintings -- Catching the Tune (1866, The Museums at Stony Brook, illustrated frontispiece) -- which he painted two years before his death. Mount's brother Robert Nelson Mount, then an itinerant dancing master in Georgia, had suggested the subject of Catching the Tune to Mount in 1840:

I saw recently a scene which I think would make a good Picture. It was two musical characters. One was whistling a tune, and the other was siting in a listening attitude with violin in hand ready to commence playing when his crony had finished his part. -- The Subject no doubt is a hacknied one, but I do not believe any one has handled it as you can.1

The violin in the painting is Mount's own “Cradle of Harmony,” a modification of the instrument he patented in 1852. The painting describes a scene which was undoubtedly a common one in Mount's life -- a musician catching a tune by ear before writing it down.

Mount himself collected hundreds of tunes and frequently shared them with other members of his family -- particularly his brother Robert -- and his musically inclined friends. Much of William's collection of tunes is in the archives of The Museums at Stony Brook. It contains more than five hundred tunes -- most of them dance tunes to be played on the fiddle -- that provide a rich source of information about the types of music enjoyed on Long Island during Mount's lifetime. William Sidney Mount's prominent place in the history of American art is largely responsible for the survival of his remarkable collection of music.2