L'Apres Diner

This box’s central image derives from a 1741 print by Nicolas de Larmessin III, royal engraver to Louis XV, after Nicolas Lancret’s 1739-41 painting The Four Times of Day: Afternoon. The print, which reverses the original painting, has been further adapted by the enameller. In addition to transposing the scene from an outdoor setting to a domestic interior, black masks have been added to each figure’s face, perhaps referring to the masquerading tradition during the Venetian Carnevale or to the black mask worn by Harlequin in the commedia dell’arte. Depictions of black masks in either of these contexts could have racialized connotations; the implication of this snuffbox’s striking deviation from Lancret’s original composition remains unclear.


Designed to hold snuff (a scented, powdered form of tobacco), snuffboxes were fashionable accessories for both men and women in the mid-eighteenth century. Snuff was believed to have a host of medicinal benefits, helping to prevent diseases and awaken the senses. It could also signal sensibility in genteel social encounters. There was an art not only to gracefully pinching and inhaling snuff, but to navigating the unspoken social codes that dictated etiquette for offering snuff to others.


Snuffboxes were just one of many luxurious trinkets, known as "toys," through which wealth and taste could be displayed. Some toys were functional, intended to store cosmetic products, foodstuffs, or snuff; others were intended for no purpose other than to delight. Some were made of precious metals, like gold or silver, and were sold at correspondingly high prices; others employed relatively inexpensive materials and were thus available to the expanding middle classes.


Enameled objects like this one, intended to imitate the lustrous quality of porcelain, were among the more affordable goods sold at toyshops across London and in fashionable English resort towns. Though often called "Battersea enamels" in common parlance (referring to the manufactory at York House, Battersea, operating only between 1753 and 1756), we rarely know exactly where individual pieces were made. The main centers of enamel production were in London, South Staffordshire (particularly in Bilston and Wednesbury), and Birmingham.


By the middle of the eighteenth century, technological innovations had made it possible to roll copper, instead of the far costlier gold, into very thin sheets. Powdered glass mixed with minerals (to determine the opacity and color of the enamel) would then be applied onto the copper sheets and fired at high temperatures. A design—whether a famous portrait, generic pastoral scene, or floral motif— could be painted on by hand or copied from an engraving through the newly invented process of transfer printing. Many enameled objects combined both methods of decoration and would be refired after the application of each new layer or color.