A rare vari-colour gold and lacquer presentation snuff box, possibly Berlin, circa 1759

Collection of Baron Max von Goldschmidt-Rothschild;

Restituted in 1949;

sold, Rosenberg and Steibel 1949 to Bensimon Gallery;

Sotheby's New York, The René Fribourg Collection: IV, Gold Snuff Boxes, October 1963, lot 247;

Bulgari, Rome;

Sotheby’s New York, Highly important French Furniture, Decorations, Porcelain, Works of Art & Gold Boxes from the Collections of Henry Ford II, 25 February 1978, lot 19

Formerly believed to of Parisian origin, more recent scholarship in the field suggested that two rather similar boxes to this box were in fact made in Berlin between the late 1750s and early 1760s. Some of the most splendorous and precious gold boxes ever made date to the reign of Frederick the Great, King in Prussia from 1740 until 1772, and King of Prussia from 1772 until 1786. Among them is a magnificent jewelled gold, enamel and hardstone table snuff box made for the King in circa 1770, the body overlaid in pierced gold subsequently filled with cobalt blue enamel (Winfried Baer, Prunk-Tabatieren Friedrichs des Großen, Munich, 1993, p. 71, no. 47). Frederick II was a passionate snuff-taker and is said to have had a collection of over three hundred boxes made by the best goldsmiths which he regularly summoned to Sanssouci Castle, at times also to discuss his own designs for these precious objects of vertu with the goldsmiths. One box is even said to have saved his life by deflecting a bullet during a battle and he evidently valued gold boxes more than crown jewels.

Two boxes that are linked to the present box, sold in Henry Ford II sale, are somewhat comparable in terms of technique and composition and seem to be the only two to have appeared on the market in the past thirty years: one with a pierced grille filled with a resinous composition that probably also contained tortoiseshell, sold Sotheby’s Paris, 19 November 2019, lot 30. The second, stylistically closer to the present box in terms of the chased mounts and the multicoloured applied gold foliage of flowers and birds, was sold at Sotheby’s Geneva, 15 November 1995 (lot 415). The relevance of Berlin as a centre of production of gold boxes and its Royal patronage since the middle of the eighteenth century that saw a great influx of talented Huguenot goldsmiths that were trained in Paris, made the present lot a very appropriate choice of a gift presented by an Empress.