A porcelain gilt-metal-mounted rectangular letter-form snuff box and cover circa 1750-60

probably Russian, modelled as a neatly folded letter fastened with a red wax seal, inscribed in script on the exterior of the cover A Madame / Madame de N... / à Son Logis, and painted on the interior with fashionably dressed figures.

Generally good condition apart from some wear to the red enamel of the seal on the underside of the box.
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The present lot was most likely made at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Porcelain Manufactory between 1750 and 1760. Snuffboxes were such an important part of the manufactory’s earliest production that Sergei Troinitskii, who worked as a curator and later director of the Hermitage, characterized the factory’s earliest production as the “snuff box period.” The snuff boxes were made in numerous shapes, but those formed as folded letters, with postage stamps with antique busts on the reverse, were undoubtedly the most popular. On the manufactory’s folded letter snuff boxes, see S.N. Troinitskii, Farforovyia tabakerki Imperatorskago Ermitazha, Petrograd, 1915 and Shedevry russkogo  farfora XVIII veka iz sobraniia galerei "Popov i Ko.,"Moscow, 2009, pp. 26-31. Factory director Baron Nikolai von Wolf also discussed the letter snuff boxes in his 1906 history of the factory and in Table II reproduced numerous unmarked examples. See N.B. von Wolf (ed. T.N. Nosovich), Imperatorskii farforovyi zavod, 1744-1904, St. Petersburg, 2003, Table II, pp. 46-47.