Snuff Box (Tabatière) (1756–57): Art, History and Details

Snuff Box (Tabatière) (1756–57) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francois Guillaume Tiron (French).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The miniature paintings that decorated snuff boxes were depicted in intricate detail requiring complex technical skill. This box’s miniatures are painted with enamel en plein, meaning the enamel has been applied directly to the metal of the box. A different enameling technique, basse-taille, is used to depict the doves and floral borders. Here, the gold has been chiseled away and filled with translucent enamel in order to produce a three-dimensional effect.

Object facts

• Title: Snuff Box (Tabatière)
• Date: 1756–57
• Creator attribution: Francois Guillaume Tiron (French)
• Culture: France
• Type: Miscellaneous
• Technique: gold and enamel
• Dimensions: Overall: 3.2 x 5.1 cm (1 1/4 x 2 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1958.125

A detail from the museum

In the mid-1700s François-Guillaume Tiron worked alongside his brother, Jean-Marie Tiron, one of the most celebrated makers of gold boxes of the 18th century.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Edward B. Greene

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William M. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 45, no. 3 (March 1958): 35-94.
• Milliken, William M. "Annual Report Issue for the Year 1957." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 45, no. 6 (June 1958): 159-90. Accessed March 26, 2020.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.