Snuffbox with portrait of a member of the French royal family, probably a daughter of Louis XV

In eighteenth-century Europe, Paris led the production of high-quality luxury goods. Parisian goldsmiths created a wide range of small, personal articles such as snuffboxes; étuis to hold sealing wax, tweezers, or utensils for sewing; souvenirs which contained thin ivory tablets for note taking, shuttles for knotting trim, and containers for cosmetics or candies.

Joseph-Étienne Blerzy (1735–1821) was one of the most prolific of all French gold box makers. He was a favored supplier of Au Petit Dunkerque, the famed emporium owned by the marchand mercier or luxury dealer Charles Raymond Grantchez. The Baronne d’Oberkirch (1754–1803) wrote in her diaries after a 1782 visit to the Paris shop that “nothing could exceed the beauty of this reservoir of jewelry; it was filled with trinkets of every kind, of which the original value was multiplied ten times by the beauty of the elaborate workmanship.”

Many of Blerzy’s boxes are oval and decorated with a single enameled medallion on the cover, enameled engine-turned panels and borders resembling pearls. Several are set with royal portraits. On this box, the portrait, by an unidentified artist, may be one of the daughters of Louis XV: the sitter wears a blue mantle decorated with fleurs-de-lis indicating she is a member of the royal family. When given as a gift or to commemorate a specific event, it was tacitly understood that diamond-set gold boxes could be exchanged for their cash value. However, this does not seem to have been the case with boxes lacking jewels.

Blerzy was at the vanguard in the use of paillon decoration on gold boxes, such as seen here in the gold stars. Paillons are small pieces of gold or silver foil cut or stamped into different shapes and fired between two layers of translucent enamel.

Resembling pearls, white enamel beads are frequently found on boxes made by Blerzy. However, on some boxes, small actual pearls replace the enamel beads.

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.