This image was cut from a volume containing the sheet music for The Punchinello Quadrille. It shows Punchinello or Pulchinello, the French version of the glove puppet Mr. Punch, doing battle with a cat, having already felled another character, and an audience including two French police officers surrounding the puppet booth. It was originally published in 1849 by William Strange (1801-1871) and James Bingley as number 208 of their series of printed piano music known as The Musical Bouquet, a series of affordable piano music produced by steel engraving and published weekly as individual pieces costing 3d, and every six months as bound volumes. This is only one page of the music, and the page number 62, verso, shows it was removed from a bound volume.

Strange and Bingley started publishing The Musical Bouquet in January 1845, with their illustrator Alfred Ashley (1820-1897) and their editor Francis Lancelott, probably inspired by G.H. Davidson's similar publication The Musical Treasury launched in 1844. Bingley had previously collaborated with Ashley in 1843-1844 to publish the two-volume Bingley's Select Vocalist, an eclectic collection of songs, glees and duets engraved by Bingley from drawings by Ashley. In the hands of Strange and Davidson the pieces published by The Musical Bouquet, including The Punchinello Quadrille, were largely pirated from other publishers. Strange sold his publishing business to his son William Strange Junior on 18th February 1849, but after that date Charles Sheard Senior is associated with The Musical Bouquet. He soon became its proprietor, increased its production to two pieces a week, and by its height of popularity in in the 1860s, to eight copies a week. On his death in 1873 his son Charles Sheard Junior took control of the firm as senior partner and The Musical Bouquet continued until 1898, after which Charles Sheard Junior continued publishing music sheets from 192, High Holborn.

William Strange Senior may have been forced to sell his publishing business, including The Musical Bouquet, to his son in 1849 as a result of the legal injunctions served on him in 1848, one by the music publisher Robert Cocks trying to stop him publishing music to which he was falsely claiming copyright. For a while his son continued using the address 21, Paternoster Row that is seen on this music sheet. William Strange Senior had a history of publishing unsuccessful titles from the 1830s, and frequently assumed ownership of other people's publications for his own purposes. This sheet was in fact a pirated copy of a French music sheet originally called Monsieur Guignolet Quadrille, dedicated to a Mlle. Jenny Figat, illustrated by the French caricaturist and lithographer Frédéric Bouchot (1798-1860), lithographed by Louis Huard (1813-1874), and published in France probably about 1845 by Auguste Sauzeau (1801-1846). The image on the The Musical Bouquet music sheet is a close copy of the French original, with some characters on the far left omitted and an arched frame and decorative ivy border added. An uncut sheet in the collection (S.1244-2010) shows that 'The Magistrate' ws the second section of the music, the first being 'Puncinello' and the third 'The Dog'.The words 'été' and 'poule' on the second page of the uncvut sheet bear witness to the French origin of the music and illustration illegally appropriated by Strange.