Smithsonian Associates: Art Meets Music – A Duet of Visual Artists and Composers, Lecture 3 – The Sharps: Family Harmony

Music and the visual arts have always walked hand in hand. For millennia, artists have obsessed about how to represent music’s invisible beauty, just as composers have sought to render art’s vibrant colors in pure sound.

Popular speaker and concert pianist Rachel Franklin leads a fascinating exploration into the intimate relationship between the visible and invisible arts and how music can literally bind the arts together.

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Meet the Sharps. Behind Johan Joseph Zoffany’s joyful late-18th-century portrait of a musical party on the Thames that depicts the family of Granville Sharp playing together lies a powerful celebration of social harmony and a true commitment to justice. Franklin explores this fascinating intersection of art, music, and history to find that the entertaining Sharps have a harmonious message for today: love music, give back, and always wear big hats.