Edwin Walter Dickinson’s life and career as an artist were strongly influenced by three tragedies: the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1903, the death of his brother Burgess, an aspiring composer who jumped to his death from the artist’s New York City studio window in 1913, and the death of a close friend in World War I. These traumatic events may have shaped Dickinson’s style, which blends the real and the surreal, the prosaic and the poetic.

"The ’Cello Player" depicts a bird’s-eye view of an older man cradling a violoncello and surrounded by an impossible array of objects. Shifting perspectives and scale suggest that these objects, many with personal associations, are floating in a dreamlike vision. Dickinson identified the “Quatuor” sheet music as by Ludwig van Beethoven, the nickname given to his deceased musician brother, and this funereal painting likely serves as a silent requiem for the dead.