Snuffbox with Portraits of Napoleon I and Josephine
Pierre Baraton (goldsmith) and Jean-François Soiron (painter) (; 1756-1812 or 1813) · Before 1807
A rectangular snuffbox of dark tortoiseshell, mounted and lined in gold, with a hinged lid edged by a thin band of translucent royal blue enamel and a frieze of golden myrtle leaves. The top is matt gold, sanded to a soft sheen, worked in low relief with laurel branches and fleurons, and set with two touching oval miniatures of Napoleon and Josephine in bust, painted by the Geneva-born enameller Jean-François Soiron. The goldsmith Pierre Baraton stamped his mark on the base and inside the lid, and the Paris hallmarks of the years seventeen ninety-eight to eighteen hundred and nine confirm the date. Under each portrait a four-line verse by a poet named Guichard, dated Paris eighteen hundred and seven, praises the emperor as hero and sage and the empress as protector of the arts.
Snuffboxes with portraits were the standard diplomatic gift of the Empire, handed out by the hundred to ambassadors, officers and officials, and this is a refined example. It came to the Louvre in eighteen seventy-four with the bequest of Philippe Lenoir and his wife. Look for the tiny lettering of the verses: the whole object is barely nine centimetres wide.
Did You Know? Hidden behind each portrait is a four-line poem of 1807 praising the emperor as a hero and the empress as a patron of the arts.
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