The music-box case with its 'poetic' laurel wreaths within Grecian palmette-enriched borders, is elegantly painted with figurative medallions, emblematic of music, and executed in the 'antique' manner of Angelic Kauffmann (d.1807). The muses of Mount Parnassus, goddesses of artistic inspiration and companions of Apollo, are portrayed on the case sides by Erato and Euterpe with tambourine and flute, while cloud-borne Apollo, on the lid, plays the lyre accompanied by youthfull genii with horn and triangle. On the front, trophies comprising scales, compass and lyre, emblematic of the art of music, rest at the feet of a poetess, who notes scores dictated by a genius beating rhythm on an anvil and bearing Euterpe's double-flute; while St. Cecilia, patron saint of music plays an organ accompanied by singing angels. The poetess is seated in the manner of John Milton's 'La Penserosa', as engraved in 1779 after a painting by Kauffmann (see: C. G. Boerner, A. Kauffmann und ihre Zeit, 1979, fig.33).
The painting with decorative insets, in the manner executed by Antonio Zucci (d.1785) and others for the architect Robert Adam's neo-classical interiors of the 1770s, and also relates to a chimney-board designed by Adam in 1778 for Osterley Park House, (illustrated M. Tomlin, Catalogue of Adam Period Furniture, London, 1972, no. H/5).
Related medallions appear on musical instruments cases, supplied at this time by Arnold Frederick Beck, cabinet-maker and musical instrument maker of Golden Square, Soho (fl.1760s-70s). G. Geard, Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, Leeds, 1986, p.56.