Snuffbox

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.

Adrien Jean Maximilien Vachette (1753–1839), the goldsmith responsible for this box, was known for the elaborate boxes he created during the Ancien Régime who remained active following the Revolution to become one of Napoleon’s jewelers and box-makers.

This snuff box is a so-called tabatière à cage, meaning that Vachette made an inner box within a skeleton of an outer box. This method allowed for a wide range of materials such as hard stones, lacquer, enamel panels, miniature paintings on vellum and ivory to be encased in a frame of gold around an inner gold box. Here the gold frame or cage holds enameled panels emulating malachite, bordered by blue enameling, possibly intended to resemble lapis lazuli.

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.