Berthon’s sepia and gold-tinged lithographs depict classical beauties playing lyres, mandolins, small viola da gambas and pipes ... But unlike the ladies poised at the keyboard or guitar in the paintings of Vermeer 3 centuries earlier, eyes demurely downcast in the company of their male teachers and chamber music partners, Berthon gave his turn-of-the-century women unsettlingly intense stares – of concentration, of awareness of the viewer looking back at them http://throwingmyarmsaroundparis.com