The Dreaming Romantic (PIST)

Your sense of beauty

A sky whose evening light changes expression minute by minute, or a piano tone with sadness somewhere in it, and something in you is suddenly moved. What you give your heart to most deeply is work that carefully expresses the ache of a moment that will not come again, or an affection kept private in the chest. Classical, beautiful form is respected, but never obeyed too strictly: feeling seeps through as a delicate waver of sound or a soft gradation of light. Looking at a small sensation that has no words, or at the shadows of a changing landscape, you feel a rich inner world of your own opening out. Inside a fragility that seems about to vanish, you find a beauty that is certain.

What moves you

Seeing the colors of the sky in a puddle after rain, trembling slightly in the wind. Or the moment the fading afterglow of a piano soaks into a quiet room and leaves an ache behind.

The beauty you tend to overlook

Work with a clear, powerful assertion, or an unwavering presence that stands its ground. Step a little away from delicate nuance and meet expression that goes straight ahead without hesitation, and you will feel a new strength filling you.

The composer in tune with you: Frédéric Chopin

Chopin left his native Poland in 1830 and never returned. The Revolutionary Étude has long been said to have been written on hearing news of the Warsaw Uprising, though there is no firm evidence for it. Keeping within the frame of the étude while entrusting an emotion he could not hold back to the violent movement of the left hand, the piece resonates with a sensibility that gives its heart to fleeting moments.

The painter who resonates with you: Claude Monet

Though critics savaged Impression, Sunrise, he went on pursuing light and air as they changed from moment to moment. In works such as Water Lilies, the soft light reflected on the surface of the water and the waver of the atmosphere are drawn on the canvas. A surface that records one instant of overflowing light within the tradition of oil painting resonates with your care for what passes and lingers.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: fixing within beautiful form the feeling of a fleeting instant — the shadings of a decaying sound, the shift of a light that leaves within minutes.

Three paintings for you

Impression, Sunrise

Claude Monet

Water Lilies

Claude Monet