The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

The mythological scene on this box’s lid is based on Charles de La Fosse’s 1680 painting The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, made for the Salon of Diana in the Palace of Versailles. To ensure his ships’ arrival in Troy, the Greek king Agammemnon intends to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. In this version of the story, she is saved by the goddess Diana (or Artemis, as she is called by the Greeks).


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.