Florentine Giltwood Music Box with Fragonard’s “A Young Girl Reading”, Embossed Scroll Ornament on a Crackled Ivory Ground, Italy, c. 1955–1975

The Piece

A shallow hinged casket in gilded and painted wood, with a music movement in the base.

The edges are scalloped and serpentine rather than straight, carried all the way round the lid and the box, and finished in burnished gold that runs as a band inside the outline.

The ground is an ivory crackle — a deliberately crazed paint film over gesso, with the gold showing through where it is worn back.

Flanking the centre, embossed scroll ornament stands up out of the surface in low relief, pressed into the gesso rather than carved.

The centre panel carries a print of Fragonard’s A Young Girl Reading, applied and varnished into the ground, framed by a fine gilt beaded line.

Inside: plain sanded wood, a divided two-compartment tray, and brass hinges. Underneath, four ball feet, a diamond winding key in a brass grommet, and two screws holding the movement.

History & Provenance

This is Florentine work, and the finish is the whole craft. Florence built a trade after the war on gilded and painted woodware — boxes, trays, frames, wastebaskets, tissue covers — made by laying gesso over wood, pressing ornament into it, gilding, then painting back over the gold and rubbing through. The scalloped edge, the crackle ground, the embossed scrollwork and the burnished gold band are the signature of that workshop tradition, and they were exported in enormous numbers.

It is not an antique, and saying so plainly is the point. Everything about the construction is twentieth-century: the machine-cut scalloped edge, the pressed rather than carved ornament, the applied print, the brass ball feet and the screw-mounted movement. Dated c. 1955–1975.

The picture is worth knowing, because it is a real one. Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted A Young Girl Reading around 1769. It hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and it is one of the most reproduced images of the French eighteenth century — a girl in a lemon-yellow dress in profile, propped against a cushion, holding a small book at arm's length. Fragonard painted it fast and left the brushwork showing, and part of why it travelled so well onto boxes and trays is that it is a picture of a private, ordinary moment rather than a grand one.

The crackle is intentional and it is not damage. A paint film laid over a ground that shrinks at a different rate opens into a fine net as it dries. Florentine finishers used it deliberately, because a crazed ivory over gold reads instantly as age, and because the cracks catch the gold underneath.

The box carries no maker's mark or label and is offered unattributed, as most Florentine giltwood is — the trade was made up of small workshops supplying exporters, and the paper labels that identified them rarely survive.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A box on a dressing table is one of the few decorative objects that also earns its place.

Rings, earrings, cufflinks, collar stays, a watch, spare keys, stamps, guitar picks — small things multiply and a divided tray with a lid is the only thing that stops them migrating across a surface. This one has two compartments and a lid that shuts properly, which is more than most decorative boxes manage.

It is also a genuinely good-looking object. Ivory and gold is a scheme that goes with everything — painted furniture, dark wood, marble, brass — and the scalloped edge and raised scrollwork mean it holds its shape in low light where a plain box would flatten out. On a dressing table, a hall console, a bedside table or a bookshelf it reads as considered rather than as clutter.

The picture gives it a second life as a small conversation. Most people recognise the yellow dress without being able to name it; being able to say it is a Fragonard from about 1769 and hangs in Washington is the kind of thing a good object should let you do.

It gives well. A wedding, a twenty-first, a housewarming, a graduation — a lidded box is the safest gift there is, because everyone finds a use for one.

A note on care, and gilded gesso has one rule. Never use water on it. The ground is water-soluble under the paint and the gilding sits on top of it; a damp cloth will lift both, and it will not come back. Dust with a soft dry brush and nothing else.

Do not polish it and do not wax it. Furniture polish darkens gesso permanently and fills the crackle, which is the finish you are paying for.

Keep it out of direct sunlight, which will fade the print, and out of damp, which lifts gesso off wood. If you want the movement playing, have a clock or music-box repairer look at it rather than winding it hard — an unserviced movement is easy to break and cheap to service.