The heritage collection · RA.1922.4
The Lark Lantern
A singing bird in a domed brass lantern, with three songs and a pause between them that visitors fill without meaning to.
1922
The Lark Lantern was made by Anselm Kroll, the organ voicer among the founders, who spent four years trying to make a bird sing a song it had not been taught and concluded, in a letter to the President, that it could not be done and that he would do it anyway.
The bird has three songs, each recorded by ear from larks in the fields east of the Cascades in the spring of 1919, and stored in a whistle of thirteen stops worked by a bellows the size of a matchbox. Between the songs it pauses, turns its head and opens its beak without sound for four seconds. Nearly everyone who hears it whistles back during the pause. Kroll intended this. It is the part of the piece he was proudest of.
Ida Weller enameled the bird’s breast. The lantern was turned in the House from a single sheet of brass.
Object record
- Object type
- Singing bird in a lantern cage
- Made
- The House, Seattle, 1918–1922
- Makers
- Anselm Kroll, bird and songs; Ida Weller, enamel; Matthias Oberle, bellows
- Materials and techniques
- Brass, enamel, feathers, kid leather; turned and pierced sheet brass
- Dimensions
- 41 cm high; 26 cm diameter
- Gallery label
- “It waits for you to answer, and you will.”
- Accession number
- RA.1922.4
- Certificate of provenance
- No. 212
- Location
- The House, Seattle. Shown on any visit
- Record
- Cataloged 1952; revised 2026
Records in the heritage catalog are compiled from the Register of Provenance and the makers’ own notebooks. Where the two disagree, the Register is preferred and the disagreement noted. Return to the collection