Exhibition NEW YEAR SURPRISES. Ancient dolls and mechanisms from the collection of David Yakobashvili

On December 10, an exhibition of ancient dolls and mechanisms from the collection of David Yakobashvili’s New Year’s Surprises begins at the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exposition included about thirty exhibits, including automatons (mechanical dolls), organettes (mechanical wind musical instruments), gramophones and musical devices of the 19th-20th centuries.

Musical mechanical instruments and dolls are a very popular direction of decorative and applied art in past centuries, combining exact science and creative imagination: the brilliance of technical thought, the amusement of theatrical performance, the sophistication of plastic and artistic solutions. And one of the most interesting phenomena is dolls. The dream to create a doll that could move and talk, has excited the imagination of people for centuries. The combination of beautiful shape, sound and movement was so attractive that already in the era of antiquity the first sound machines began to be created, and the development of mechanics and especially watch production made it possible to design and improve their mechanisms.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, automatons and multi-figure compositions appeared, where each doll fulfills its role. Mechanical dolls of the workshops of Jacques Droz, Vaucanson, Mayard, Vichy, Lambert, Bertrand and others copied the plastics of living people, surprising and astonishing the audience with the incredible similarity of their movements. These dolls with porcelain faces and hands, in clothes made of expensive fabrics, with complex mechanisms and musical devices in the case or stand were not intended for children’s games, they served as entertainment for adults. They were purchased as an expensive "mechanical fun" and shown to friends. The dolls depicted people engaged in any business: girls playing musical instruments; playing children; musicians Africans; dancing circus performers.

So, in the exposition one can see automatons made in the Vichy workshop (France) in the 19th century - these are Ballerina and Two Black Musicians and Violinist. Among other exhibits, one can distinguish the automaton “Jumbo Elephant”, the prototype of which was that same elephant weighing 6 tons, nicknamed Jumbo, from the Phineas Taylor Barnum circus. Automaton "Elephant Jumbo" was made in the workshop "Roulet" (France) at the end of the XIX century. Some 20th-century masters paid tribute to their predecessors. For example, the mechanical doll "The Master Designing a Mechanical Duck", made by the master Loren (Grenoble, France, c. 1950), refers us to the master Jacques de Waucanson and his famous mechanical duck, created in 1739.

Also at the exhibition will be presented several gramophones, including a gramophone of the company “His Master’s Voice” (Great Britain), organettes of work of German masters of the beginning of the 20th century and a music box produced by a Swiss workshop. Musical devices of this kind have been used in waiting rooms at railway stations in Switzerland since 1887.

Today, a great variety of jukeboxes are known, from the most complicated orchestrions, organs and grand pianos to puppets, interior items and dishes with a “musical surprise” that still captivate the audience. Throughout the twentieth century, mechanics and artists continued to create new models of automatic dolls, and today, according to the models of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, masters successfully assemble models of automatic dolls from antique parts, antique fabrics and lace, following the traditions of the best masters of their time.