WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
A Few Remarks Concerning Makers of Singing Bird Boxes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries cover

A Few Remarks Concerning Makers of Singing Bird Boxes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter 2: Singing Bird boxes
By Georges Pélissier
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

ArtHistory - European

About This Book

The text traces the mid-eighteenth-century invention and development of mechanical singing-bird boxes, explaining their distinctive automata—wings moving, beak opening, head turning—and giving criteria for identifying antiques. It profiles principal makers such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son, the Bruguier family, and the Rochat family, summarizes workshop practices and familial lineages, and surveys surviving examples in royal courts, museums, and private collections. Decorative materials, technical innovations, geographic distribution including Chinese imperial ownership, and the scarcity of records for lesser artisans are described, along with notable specimens and typical ornamentation.

Singing Bird boxes

The invention of these marvellous pieces of mechanism dates from about the middle of the eighteenth century.

When they first appeared they were so highly praised that they were immediately bought by the principal Courts of Europe, and it is only later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the very high class of people could acquire the rare specimen that came now and then on the market.—

The characteristic of the antique singing bird snuff boxes, is that the bird, when singing and moving its wings, opens its beak, when turning the head. It is unfortunate to say, that modern watchmakers have not acquired the skilfulness of their predecessors, and that in modern boxes this triple movement can no more be obtained. This is, as a matter of fact, one of the first means of distinguishing an antique bird box, from a modern one.—

Singing Bird Box

Signed “Jaquet-Droz and Leschot London”

(from an old engraving)

Actually in the collection of Mr Luis Dubois-Favre

Le Loele, Switzerland.

The discovery of these small curious pieces of mechanism is due to a Swiss watchmaker whose name is