There can be nothing more inspiring for a Music Lover than to look upon an excellent portrait of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms or Schubert and then start playing the Music of these Masters.
— Advertisement for "Bosworth's Portrait Series", 1925.

That's probably undeniable, but only if the portrait is truly excellent. Music scores of my boyhood, especially the cheap compilations, used to have awful portraits of the great masters, as if copied by a child from some well-known engraving. They all came out looking mildly disturbed and assymetrical, maybe just dismayed by their new-found assymetry. In the background of each portrait there would usually be some scribbling, a sort of ham-fisted attempt at creating a little mood and atmosphere. The worst one was Prokofiev. It looked like it should have had "Prokofiev Stinks" scrawled underneath.