Allegorie op de muziek, dans en poëzie uitgebeeld door drie Putti 1805 - 1858

Ary Scheffer created this delicate drawing of three putti, representing music, dance, and poetry, sometime during his career, which spanned the first half of the 19th century. Scheffer was a product of his time, when the French Revolution was in recent memory, and the rise of Romanticism was in full swing. His artistic output shows the push and pull between Neoclassical artistic values and Romanticism's emotional intensity. In this piece, he leans on traditional allegorical figures in a soft, sentimental evocation of the arts. This drawing, rendered in muted tones, embodies the Romantic era's idealized vision of childhood. The putti, traditionally symbols of divine love, are reimagined here as cherubic embodiments of human creativity. Scheffer's choice to depict the arts through these figures speaks to a cultural desire to see artistic inspiration as pure, innocent, and divinely touched. While on the surface, the work presents a harmonious vision of creativity, it also hints at the complex relationship between innocence, artistry, and societal expectations.