A gold and porcelain snuffbox made by Sèvres for Madame Adélaïde, the daughter of King Louis XV, will return to the Palace of Versailles for the first time since the French Revolution. Beautifully painted on the outside of the lid, inside of the lid and on the bottom with portraits of royal dogs and cats, it is one of only four Sèvres snuffboxes depicting the pets of the French royal family known to have been made. Only three of them survive today, and only one of the three belonged to another royal princess (Adélaïde’s younger sister Madame Victoire). The other belonged to the king’s mistress Madame de Pompadour.
The box has an extraordinary and well-documented ownership history. The Royal Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory made the oval porcelain snuffbox with a bleu-lapis ground in its hallmark deep blue shade and a chased and engraved gold mount by royal goldsmiths Charles Ouizille and Pierre-François Drais in 1785.
Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800), the formidable daughter of Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczyńska, commissioned the paintings of her four dogs and one cat, starring her white barbet Vizir with his distinctive lion cut on the lid. One of Sèvres’ finest painters, Nicolas-Pierre Pithou the Younger, created the miniature portraits. The lid depicts Vizir and a pug playing in a garden; on the bottom a greyhound and spaniel frolic in a wooded landscape. The interior cover features a fluffy black and white cat wearing a pink ribbon on a cushion with a garland of flowers, a pair of lanterns on a stick and a dog collar inscribed “Adelaid.” The cat is pawing at a ring toy that looks like something you could get from a pet store today.
The Sèvres sales records document the stages of this creation, culminating in an entry on January 19, 1786: “delivered to Madame Adélaïde: 1 blue snuffbox mounted in gold and painted with dogs and a cat.” The princess had three years to enjoy her snuff out of this box before the Fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and less than two years after that, she and her sister Victoire fled France for Rome, escaping with their lives, an entourage of 80 and a baggage train full of valuables and cash. They had to flee again when Revolutionary France invaded Italy in 1796, this time finding refuge in Naples. In 1799, France invaded Naples. The sisters fled yet again, first to Corfu, then to Trieste. Adélaïde died there on February 27, 1800.
At what point Adélaïde had to let go of her doggie snuffbox is unknown. It is next documented in the collection of Baron Gustave de Rothschild (1829-1911), who inherited his father Baron James de Rothschild’s collection of porcelains, so it was likely acquired by James (1792-1868). It could have entered the objets d’art market after Adélaïde’s death, but she could also have sold the snuffbox herself during her time in Italy. An English travel writer from the period describes her and Victoire selling their jewels to support emigrées.
The snuffbox has been in the Rothschild family be descent since the 1800s. The last inheritor of it put it under the hammer at Bonham’s London on December 2nd. It sold for £190,900 ($257,000), a new world record for a Sèvres box. The non-profit Society of the Friends of Versailles acquired it for the national collection.
This snuffbox is thus an extraordinary example of a royal personal object whose history is fully documented, making it a privileged testimony to the art of living at Versailles in the 18th century .
With this acquisition, the Palace of Versailles enriches an already remarkable collection of artifacts dedicated to Madame Adélaïde and the daughters of Louis XV. Highly sought after on the market, royal snuffboxes of this quality – often dismantled to recover the mounts and precious stones – are almost impossible to identify.
The arrival of such a prestigious and intimate object in the collections of the Palace of Versailles represents an exceptional opportunity.
* This article was originally published here
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