Madame de Pompadour snuff box

The two dogs painted on the lid of the box are Inès and Mimi, who belonged to Madame de Pompadour, favourite of King Louis XV of France, and are well known from prints after Christophe Huet and the paintings of Jean-Jacques Bachelier. There is a record of Madame de Pompadour buying two velvet collars with gold plaques for their names from the marchand-mercier Lazare Duvaux.

She also kept exotic birds in aviaries, and each of the six porcelain plaques corresponds to a known painting or an 18th-century description of a painting by Bachelier. However, the box is marked with the Warden's mark for Paris for 1772-73, which dates its manufacture to at least eight years after the death of the Marquise. The unmounted Sèvres porcelain plaques are precisely described under lot number 770 in the sale catalogue for the posthumous sale of Pierre-André Jacquemin on the 26th of April 1773. He valued Madame de Pompadour's possessions at her death, so it seems likely that he acquired the unmounted plaques at that time, and that they were subsequently mounted into the present box by the goldsmith Roucel in 1773.

The Rothschild family collected gold boxes, particularly those from 18th-century France, and this box was bought by Miss Alice de Rothschild in 1904, to whose devotion to dogs it must have appealed.

Waddesdon (National Trust)
Bequest of James de Rothschild, 1957

Mia Jackson, 2019