Early Acquisitions
The first instrument the museum acquired was a theorbo-lute made by Jacob Heinrich Goldt of Hamburg in 1734 , bought from an unknown source for £8 in 1856, a year before this museum moved to its present site in South Kensington.
The earliest instrument, with a known original history, is a harpsichord, shown below,made in 1574 by Giovanni Baffo of Venice for the Strozzi, a leading banking family from Florence. Henry Cole, the first director of this museum, acquired it in 1859 for the remarkably low sum of £6 - 7s (£6.35). He bought it from William Blundell Spence, who at that time was the leading English dealer in Renaissance works of art, and based in Italy.
Other instruments come from a number of different sources, ranging from dealers and collectors to owners of historic houses. The jewelled spinet below, made by Annibale Rossi in 1577, had originally belonged to a Milanese nobleman by the name of Carlo Trivulzio. It finally ended up in the collections of Antoine-Louis Clapisson (1806-66), a composer and music teacher, before being bought for £1200 by the South Kensington Museum in 1869.
Click on an image below to find out more.
