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Music Box with a small 'Garden'

Unusual Cylinder Musical Box with Bells and 'Garden', presumably a dancing doll (now absent)

C. 1885. Playing eight popular and operatic airs including motifs from "Faust" and "Carmen", with 102 teeth in comb (missing three treble tips), six bells with polychrome butterfly strikers, bird and flower finials flanking an enclosure with flowers and foliage, nickel-plated movement, zither attachment, tune-indicator, change/repeat and two sets of stop/play controls, in book-matched thuya-veneered case with brass and mother-of-pearl inlay on front and lid, wd. 28 in. (71 cm), cylinder 14 in. (36 cm), movement in playing condition, groups of bent pins, several damaged teeth on the spring barrel, one butterfly replaced, another missing a wing, case missing left-hand divider.

Note: The 'garden' has provision for a moving element, presumably a dancing doll (now absent), controlled via a cam in the governor train. This mechanism has been disabled, but appears to be largely complete.

Another curious feature is he additional stop/play control, which may originally have served to silence the bells of bring them into play.

Ord-Hume illustrates an organ musical box with a similar layout and an automaton bird in "The Musical Box, a Guide for Collectors", p. 38.

An unusual bell box, with lively, ambitious arrangements, worthy of sympathetic restoration. (Breker)

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