Designed by marquetry master Silas Kopf, this unique art case was built to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. The piano was auctioned as part of a fundraiser for the Thoreau Institute, in Concord, Massachusetts. The piano was entirely built from woods native to Massachusetts, actually sourced from the beautiful Walden Woods that served as Thoreau’s literary inspiration. The rim depicts twelve plaques of the flora and fauna seen around Walden Pond. The legs are parabolic in shape and each is a pond scene, with the water line running at the same height on all three. At the top of the rim there is a long frieze with a famous sentence from Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live there deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”