Today, on the International Violin Day, we present an object from the museum Collection exposition – a violin-shaped music box created in Vienna around 1890.

The case of the box has the shape of a violin with a gilded fingerboard, with a cupid's head on the headstock. All surfaces of the case, framed with openwork plated ornament, are decorated with enamel pictorial images. A courteous scene with the image of a young man in brightly coloured suit and a girl in white dress sitting on a bench under a stele among umbrageous trees is on the front side.

This pictorial enamel image is a copy of the painting “Innocence”, which was created by the French artist Nicolas Lancret circa 1743.
The canvas was probably commissioned to the artist in 1743 for the apartment of Marquise de La Tournelle in the Palace of Versailles. The The apartments occupied the floor above the royal ceremonial salons of Mercury and Apollo. The same year, Louis XV elevated the Marquise de La Tournelle to the rank of Duchesse de Châteauroux.
Nowadays, the painting is in the Louvre, in the hall of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Before entering the Louvre, the painting was in the collection of Louis XV.

The other couple is depicted on the case rear side: a young man with a guitar and a girl with an open book are seated at the foot of a pedestal with a bust of a man. The prototype for this image was the famous painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau in chamber format, “The Scale of Love”.

This picture is a fine example of Watteau’s work on an intimate scale. The title The Scale of Love (La Gamme d’Amour) comes from a print of it made several years after his death. It may be a reference to the musical scale, to the various stages of flirting and seduction, or to the music which facilitates these. The word gamme had other secondary meanings, such as knowledge, ability and custom, perhaps reinforcing the notion here of love or seduction as a skill. The sculpted bust is possibly Pythagoras, who is credited with discovering a musical scale based upon a mathematical ratio.

Watteau may have chosen the man’s fantasy theatrical costume to poetically distance the scene from his own time. The painting shows his skill in composition and as a colourist, with its warm harmonies of pink, red and russet brown.

A knurled button for activating musical mechanism with pinned metal cylinder for two tunes, a sound comb and a spring drive are on the fingerboard rear side. A fixed key for winding the mechanism is on the bottom of the rear side.