Lyre guitar, mahogany back and sides, pine belly, French, about 1805-1810.

"Lyre-shaped with hollow curving arms and an attached neck between. The back, slightly arched, is of two pieces of mahogany, each of which is continued to form the back of one of the arms. Belly of two pieces of pine, similarly extending up the arms. Two open soundholes with mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell mosaic edging, as also the edge of the belly. Pin bridge. The base of the body is flat, enabling the instrument to stand upright. The neck is joined to the body as on an ordinary guitar and is faced with a flat ebony fingerboard flush with the belly and with ornamental gilt wooden rods. The flat head is joined to the points of the arms by two ornamental gilt wooden rods. There are six rear pegs, for six gut strings." Anthony Baines, Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum - Part II: Non-keyboard instruments (London, 1998), pp. 64-65.

This instrument was part of the collections of Carl Engel (1818 - 1882) and was bought by the Museum in 1882 for £2-10-0.

In the opinion of M. Daniel Sinier, author of La Guitare. Paris 1650-1950 (Turin, 2008), this lyre-guitar is French and most likely made in Paris.

The Lyre-guitar first appeared in France in about 1780. The fashion for Ancient Greek motfis like Apollo's lyre, combined with the increasing popularity of the guitar, encouraged the development of this hybrid instrument. By about 1800, guitars with six single strings (like this example) were increasingly adopted by players who until then had mostly used versions with five pairs of strings or 'courses'. This lyre-guitar is very similar to one depicted in Johann Christoph Rincklake's The Coppenrath Family in a Boating Party of 1807 (Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte).

249-1882