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Hiroshi Sugimoto’s fascination with optics and illusion is a consistent theme throughout his five-decade career. In 1976, Sugimoto began his earliest project, Dioramas, a series of photographs taken at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These early images challenged the cultural assumption that photographs depict truth. Sugimoto's photographs of the dioramas were so cleverly photographed that they appear to be real environments, despite titles such as 'Devonian Period' and 'Earliest Human Relatives.'

'I made a curious discovery while looking at the exhibition of animal dioramas: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.'

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Although made more than 20 years later, The Music Lesson is a natural extension of the Dioramas series. It is part of Sugimoto's Portraits series commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, in 1999. Madame Tussauds Amsterdam had created a wax tableau inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece, Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman. Sugimoto photographed the tableau, placing his tripod in the location where Vermeer would have placed his easel. A hint of the legs of Sugimoto's tripod are visible reflected in the mirror over the harpsichord. Through this action, Sugimoto kindles a dialogue between painting and mechanical reproduction. Other photographs in the series feature portraits of historical figures, such as Henry VIII, Fidel Castro, Princess Diana, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Originally conceived of in black and white, this image debuted with other works from the Portraits series at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He revisited this image for his 2005 portfolio Origins of Love, a sequence of eight photographs that visually explore the evolution of human desire.

Both the color and black and white editions of this image are sold out. Prints of this image in the gelatin silver format are in the collects ions of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Osaka.