Fifteen Puzzle Sliding Numbers Game in Birds Eye Veneer Box tabletop toy with its original dry

with its original dry

The bentwood is approximately 3/8 inches thick

I would guess this painting dates to the the 1910s or so

I believe it is actually a portrait of the late artist and longtime art professor Leon Hovsepian of Worchester

I believe the bristles are straw of some type

Fifteen Puzzle Sliding Numbers Game in Birds Eye Veneer Box tabletop toy with its original dryThere is a terrific book by Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld titled "The Fifteen Puzzle" (check it out here), which details the rise of the game's popularity in the 1880s ad the many iterations that have been produced over the years since. (It also details a bunch of variations on solving it, the most basic being sliding the tiles to put them in order from 1 15.) In it is pictured one set that looks a very much like this one, which they speculate might