Edwin Dickinson - The Cello Player

The fourth of Dickinson's paintings that Driscoll identified as major and symbolical, The Cello Player, 1924–26, took the longest to paint of works to that date. Again, the dominant figure is an old man, ostensibly playing a cello in a room littered with objects and seen from above, so that the space tips up to a horizon well above the picture top. The progressive tipping and enclosure of space can be observed in the sequence of works leading up to this one, a strategy that parallels modernist tendencies toward pictorial abstraction accompanied by spatial flattening. Nevertheless, the figure and objects in this picture give up none of their volume or tactile presence as objects. Music from a Beethoven quartet in the foreground, and two keyboard instruments at the right, suggest again the equation of painting and music, although the picture's narrative coherence is undermined, with objects positioned not for use but to create visual rhythms and harmonies.

Driscoll sees the painting as a tribute to Beethoven, the composer Dickinson honored above all others, and, through him, to his brother Burgess, pianist and composer, whom his fellow students at Yale had nicknamed "Beethoven."