Snuffbox

Small gold boxes intended to hold snuff, a form of powdered and often scented tobacco, became a focus of an elaborate social ritual and a symbol of extravagance and vanity in eighteenth-century France.

The containers were usually of such luxurious nature that they were the ultimate fashion accessories in eighteenth-century Europe and were frequently given as presents. Beginning in the 1720s and continuing up to the French Revolution, snuff boxes were produced in significant quantities.

Characteristic of gold boxes created in the mid-1740s is the all-over decoration which conceals the division between the cover and the body of the box. In this example, flowers and plants are shown in relief against a striated background. The subtle inward curves of the sides are a stage in the transition from the earlier shaped boxes (for example 48.187.499) to the straight sides dominant after the 1750s.

According to Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, boxes like this one, made entirely of gold, were referred to as tabatières pleines. Regardless of the design and decoration of a gold box, the methods of construction are essentially the same. For each one, there was an interior box which provided an airtight and perfectly smooth container to hold the snuff, and an exterior box which could be decorated.

Daughter of one of the founders of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, Catherine D. Wentworth (1865–1948) was an art student and painter who lived in France for over thirty years. She became one of the most important American collectors of eighteenth-century French silver and on her death in 1948 bequeathed part of her significant collection of silver, gold boxes, French furniture and textiles to the Metropolitan Museum.