A two-coloured gold and malachite snuff box, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Jan de Villeclair, Paris, 1784

Sotheby's London, 26 October 1948, lot 33

The collection of the late Graham Baron Ash, Christie's London, 26 June 1980, lot 173

The former owner of this gold box, Graham “Baron” Ash was born in 1889, the son of Birmingham-born industrialist, Alfred Ash. In 1925, Ash inherited Packwood House in Warwickshire after the death of his father who had allegedly bought the house, ‘because the Boy wanted it' ('History of Packwood House', corresponding National Trust Website).

Baron Ash – as he liked to be known – spend the next four decades restoring the house as well as building an extensive art collection – particularly of 16th- and 17th-century furniture – much of which was bought from nearby Baddesley Clinton. The writer and expert in country houses, James Lees-Milne commented in 1947 that Ash had, ‘filled [Packwood] with appropriate furniture, tapestries, stained-glass and ornaments of great beauty', where the unusual malachite box with its subtle elegance would have blended in seamlessly.

 In 1941, Ash left Packwood House to the National Trust and moved to Wingfield Castle in Norfolk, with the stipulations that none of the furnishing be moved and that fresh flowers from the garden were displayed in Packwood daily. He died in 1980.

Alexis Kugel, Gold Jasper and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court, London, 2012, 226.

It is interesting to note that the present box seems to be one of the few instances where Parisian goldsmiths took inspiration from gold box makers or lapidaries based in Germany, rather than the other way round. A similar ribbon marquetery of Schlottwitz agate instead of malachite can be seen in several gold boxes made by Johann Christian Neuber in Dresden at least a decade earlier (see for example a jewelled snuff box in the Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam (BK-17162) and cat. no 32 in this collection).

Malachite – a form of copper carbonate – is characterised by its distinctive green colour. Despite being used in classical times in parts of Asia Minor as both a dye and in small objects such as jewellery, malachite was not used in the decorative arts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. Then, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, large deposits of the vivid green rock were found in Russia, most prevalently in the Gumeshevsky and Mednorudyansky mines in the southern Urals. It was from this point that malachite started to be used in Russian decorative arts in significant volume.

Malachite is generally extracted in small blocks because of its relative softness compared to other hardstones. Thus, it could not be used monolithically and was better suited to small decorative objects, though examples or malachite furniture do exist. It could be argued that the lattice pattern found on this snuffbox was in keeping with the construction of larger malachite objects in this period, where the stone would often be cut into small pieces, before being laid in geometric patterns.

The present box is an early example of the increased prevalence of malachite outside Russia. The popularity of the striking green mineral grew at the end of the eighteenth century as a result of several important diplomatic gifts given by Russia to European leaders. As in the present box, malachite was often accompanied by gold or gilt bronze: the gold and green complement each other beautifully (see also Anna Maria Massinelli, Hardstones: The Gilbert Collection, London, 2000 and V. B. Semenyov, Malachite, Sverdlovsk: Mid-Urals Publishing House, 1987).