Romantic Guitar｜1880's

The latest beauty that entered our shop is this Romantic guitar. It was built at the end of the 19th century, around 1880 and is said to be built in France. Not much information from this period is available, but we can surely tell you that this guitar is a real treasure! It is built from solid maple, the right hand side of it is fixed with a separate piece of maple. This guitar has soundhole inlays, a moustache bridge and multi scale frets to ensure better intonation. We can proudly say that it has survived two world wars and it is still in great condition! The guitar plays and sounds very well. The neck is very straight, the action is slightly high though it is normal for a classical guitar, moreover it being from this period.
 
The Romantic guitar has a rich history, beginning during the last decades of the 18th century. First Romantic guitar was built in 1774 by Ferdinando Gagliano in Naples. The romantic guitar eventually led to Antonio de Torres Jurado's fan-braced Spanish guitars, the immediate precursors of the modern classical guitar.
 
Around the same time France also began to produce guitars with six single courses and Spain soon followed. Italian, French, and Spanish six-string guitars differed from the baroque guitar in similar ways. In addition to the advances already mentioned the guitar was gradually given more pronounced curves and a larger body while ornamentation was more restrained, remaining mostly around the edges of the body and the sound hole, which lacked a decorative rose to allow more volume. Frets were no longer of tied gut but fixed strips of some harder material, first ebony or ivory then metal. Wooden pegs were later replaced by metal tuning machines.