Snuffbox

Small gold boxes intended to hold snuff, a form of powdered and often scented tobacco, became a focus of an elaborate social ritual and a symbol of extravagance and vanity in eighteenth-century France.

The containers were usually of such luxurious nature that they were the ultimate fashion accessories in eighteenth-century Europe and were frequently given as presents. Beginning in the 1720s and continuing up to the French Revolution, snuff boxes were produced in significant quantities.

In the 1750s the tour à guilloché or engine turning was invented used to create intricate, repetitive geometric patterns on metal, often for watches or jewelry. This device provided a method of engraving metal which essentially supplanted the craft of the hand-engraver. The cover of this gold box made in 1752–53 is incised with radiating wavy rays resembling a fashionable moiré silk. A similar pattern zigzags down the sides of the lid and continues down the body, completely masking the division between the two.

It is difficult to determine whether the engraving on a box like this one was done by machine or by hand. Known designs for snuffboxes include examples intended to be hand-engraved with an almost machine-like precision.

Indicative of the enthusiasm for collecting and owning gold snuff boxes is the letter from the Earl of Chesterfield to his son regarding his impending visit to Paris in 1750: “There is another sort of expense that I will not allow, only because it is a silly one; I mean the fooling away your money at toy-shops. Have one handsome snuff-box (if you take snuff) and one handsome sword; but then no more very pretty and very useless things.” [Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters written by the late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield to his Son…11th ed. (London, 1810), Letter CXXI dated November 8, 1750, p. 238.]

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.