Flute playing automaton

During the century of the Industrial Revolution, the technology of automatons was chiefly mastered by French craftsmen. Alexandre-Nicolas Théroude, the creator of this piece for which he filed a patent in 1866, was known for being the first person to enclose the mechanism in the body of the automaton. While the automaton’s position was inspired by an ancient marble statue in the Louvre, a faun playing a flute, its decorative shell took on the appearance and the colours of the subjects of the French colonial empire, then at its apogee, in order to satisfy the exotics tastes of the times. It has a mechanical barrel organ in its chest, giving the illusion of the music played by a flautist. The dates of creation of the operetta songs that it plays suggest that this model was most likely manufactured immediately after 1878, the year of the Paris World’s Fair. Thanks to this piece’s extraordinary state of conservation mechanical organ still runs today with all of its original parts, meaning no part has been replaced, other than the skin of the bellows.