A gold and enamel snuff box, Paris, 1745-7

Vente Pichon, 1897;

Collection Guilhou, 7-9 December 1905, lot 113

There has been great interest in recent years in the

raised enamels popular on gold boxes in Paris at this

date. The focus, led by the late Charles Truman's

research into the enameller Aubert, has been on the

more common decoration of raised painted naturalistic

flowers with basse-taille leaves. Less attention has been

paid to other raised enamel ornament such as insects,

shells or fruit, for example, which were also explored in

the seventeen-forties. An album of designs, formerly the property of D. David-Weill (Sotheby's, London, 14th

November 1984, lots 189-229), produced the drawings

for a small number of such boxes, notably the celebrated

seashell and coral box, Jean Ducrollay, Paris, 1742

(Sotheby's, 21st June 1982, lot 47, both box and design

illustrated A. Kenneth Snowman, Gold Boxes of Europe,

Woodbridge, 1990, p.99). Such happy chances are rare

and unsurprisingly there are contemporary descriptions

for which neither box nor design appear to have survived.

The lists of boxes in the royal corbeilles de mariage are

tantalising – a box of 1745 'émaillée de grappes de raisin';

in 1747 others enamelled with ears of corn, cherries, or

'en pesches' as well as the prevalent flowers (A. Maze-

Sencier, Le Livre des Collectionneurs, Paris, 1885, pp.152-

3).

The present box is arresting in the elegant simplicity of

its stylised raspberry design which gains effect from the

play of light on the highly-raised translucent drupelets

and leaves against the rippled surface. The wavy trellis

ground is similar to that seen on a box of 1747/8, also

with illegible maker's mark, in the Thyssen Collection,

decorated, possibly by Aubert, with multi-coloured

flowers on translucent green wavy lozenges (Somers

Cocks & Truman, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection,

Renaissance jewels, gold boxes, etc., London, 1984,

no. 47). The formal design is similar to that of several

drawings from the album cited above (Snowman, op. cit.,

pls. 6-11).