The picture was first exhibited at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, but it may have been retouched before it appeared at the New Gallery the following year since it is dated 1889. Both in conception and handling it is one of the artist's most exquisite productions. F.G. Stephens was right to praise it highly in the Athenaeum: 'The bust, Music, Heavenly Maid, of a beautiful muse, laureated and holding a violin and bow, while she looks up with contemplative rapture, is a masterpiece of Mr Poynter's drawing perhaps, searching modelling, and of his power to render an intense expression'. The musical associations and subdued tones create a very 'aesthetic' effect, and it is perhaps no accident that Poynter chose to exhibit the drawing at the New Gallery, heir to the Grosvenor, rather than at the Royal Academy. It is also significant that it belonged to that great aesthete Sir William Eden, Whistler's antagonist and himself a fine watercolour painter (see Whistler's pamphlet The Baronet and the Butterfly and Timothy Eden, The Tribulations of a Baronet, 1933)