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.

Boxes of varicolored gold were made predominantly in the 1750s. Copper was alloyed with gold to produce red, arsenic or steel filings to produce blue and gray, and silver to produce white and green.

Each colored element had to be soldered separately onto the surface of the box. Here, all six surfaces are decorated with flower sprays on a finely ribbed ground. Boxes of this shape, where the height and depth are exactly equal, began to be popular at this time.

Catherine Wentworth, the former owner of this box, was evidently partial to work of varicolored gold as her collection includes many such snuffboxes. Prior to the Wentworth bequest entering The Met in 1948, very few examples of varicolored gold were in the collection. The celebrated Morgan collection of gold boxes (accessioned in 1917) is almost completely lacking in examples of this technique.

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 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.