A violinist looks with an angry furrowed brow at a paper held up for him by a messenger boy. The lithograph is wittily captioned Une note sensible -- a play on the French term for the leading-tone (the dissonant seventh scale degree that must resolve by half-step to the tonic).

The lithograph is No. 25 in a series of 30 entitled Les bonnes Têtes Musicales by the print publisher Aubert. Aubert reissued and expanded the series after an original set of 11 lithographs by the same title that appeared in the Parisian journal Le Charivari some years prior.