Art Deco Silvered Turned Wood Musical Powder Box, Brass Ball Feet, c. 1935–1945

The Piece

An American musical powder box of the 1930s, turned from solid wood, finished in silver outside and gold inside, and fitted with a wind-up music movement in its base. The form is a stepped, domed drum: a tall body with a wide molded foot ring, a deep band around the waist stamped in relief with a running garland of dogwood blossoms and leaves on a hatched ground, and a stepped shoulder that receives the domed lid. The lid is turned in three steps and finished with a small brass ball knob chased with a Greek key band, and the box stands on three matching brass ball feet with the same Greek key band. The exterior is silvered, a leaf or metallic finish over the wood that has toned to a soft, mottled pewter with the brighter silver showing on the turned edges and moldings; the interior of the lid and the well are finished in old gold, with the concentric rings of the lathe still visible under the color.

The music movement sits in the base under the well. A brass T-shaped winding key is set into the center of the base, and a small brass pin projects through the floor of the well to start and stop the tune, the usual arrangement in a musical powder box, where the weight of the powder puff on the pin silences the movement and lifting it sets the tune going. The base is stamped U.S. PATENT NO. 2,00 ,804, the fourth digit lost to a small hole in the wood, a number in the series granted in 1935.

The box is sound and complete, with lid, knob, three feet, winding key and start pin all present. The silvered finish is worn and toned, as these always are, with a loss to the silver at one point on the lid rim; the gold inside is rubbed where the puff sat and the lid shows a shallow shrinkage check across the base disc. The movement has not been wound or tested and is offered as found. The box is offered as a decorative piece with its original finish, not restored.

History & Provenance

The musical powder box was a dressing table novelty of the 1930s and 1940s. American makers bought small Swiss and American cylinder movements, Thorens and Reuge among the Swiss, and set them into the bases of turned wood, Bakelite, metal and glass powder boxes, so that lifting the puff played a few bars of a waltz or a popular tune. They were sold through department stores and jewelers as gifts and as premiums for cosmetics houses, and turned wood versions in silver and gold leaf, with brass ball feet and a dogwood or rose band, were among the earliest of them. The patent stamp on the base of this one covers the start-and-stop arrangement or the box itself, and the series it belongs to places the design in 1935, which fits the Deco stepping of the lid and the brass Greek key mounts.

No maker's name is present and the box is offered as an unattributed American piece. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the solid turned wood body, the leaf-type silver and gold finishes, the stamped brass dogwood band and Greek key ball mounts, the T-key wound movement with a puff-actuated start pin and the 1935 patent series are all consistent with manufacture between about 1935 and 1945.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a piece for a dressing table, a bathroom shelf or a nightstand, where it holds powder, cotton, rings or earrings under a lid that asks to be lifted. The worn silver and the brass balls give it the soft, slightly tarnished glamour of a 1930s vanity, and it sits as well among perfume bottles and a hand mirror as on a stack of books in a collected living room. For a shop or designer client it is the small, complete, original-finish Deco vanity piece that styles a boudoir vignette and gives a buyer a story to tell.