Idle Hours

A smaller version of The Sonata (Au Balcon) (1910) in the Art Gallery of Ballarat. 'Bunny took more than two years to paint a series of around twenty-one night balcony scenes, each a fair size, and at least four on huge canvases with figures larger than life. They were painted between 1907 and 1910 ... Many of the night images, with other paintings, were shown in London in April 1911 as 'Days and Nights in August'. They were images of summer. Though ostensibly intimate, the scenario is theatrical ... Meditative, preoccupied, langorous and at ease, they listen to distant music. ... Of all Bunny's paintings, the night images perhaps came closest to French Symbolism. They came tardily, at a time when Parisians, grown somewhat tired of half-lights, refinements and complications -- bored, in fact, with Symbolism and the strained aestheticism of J.K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours -- were on the verge of responding with excitement to the orgiastic violence of the Ballet Russes.' (M. Eagle, The Art of Rupert Bunny, Canberra, 1991, p.72.)

The Art Gallery of Ballarat records that when their painting was being acquired Bunny wrote to the Mr. G. K. Sutton, Honorary Secretary of the Gallery, that 'The picture was painted in 1910 and shown in the Royal Academy in 1911. I called it "The Sonata", the idea being these women are listening to music from the balcony of a room, which it really was, as a Danish woman & a very fine pianist a friend of ours was playing the "moonlight sonata".'