A rare gold-mounted hardstone snuff box, Louis Siriès, Florence, circa 1735

On peut dire qu’en petit & en un genre de mignature, il y a fait une des plus belles choses qu’on ait jamais imaginées' – this observation about the ingenious, yet still somewhat elusive goldsmith and gem-engraver Louis Siriès certainly remains true until this day, as the present lot illustrates (Joannon de Saint-Laurent, Description et explication d’un camée de lapis lazuli fait en dernier lieu par Mr. Louis Siries artiste françois, orfèvre du roi de France et emploïé dans la galerie de Florence, 1747, p. 37).

Born in c. 1686 in Figeac in France, Louis Siriès began his career as a coutelier and ran his own business, later supplying the eminent Parisian silversmiths of the period - such as Thomas Germain (1673–1748), Orfèvre du Roi since 1720, who commissioned Siriès with parts of a toilet service for Marie Leczinska (1703-1768), Queen of France. Siriès’ earliest engraved gem – the category for which he is perhaps best known today - dates to 1733. In 1757 he published a catalogue of 168 gems which he had engraved since 1746, among them examples in agate, chalcedony, onyx etc, with the representations varying from famous portraits to mythological and biblical subjects to allegories, trophies and animals.

Although Siriès had been appointed Orfèvre privilégié to Louis XV on 18 May 1729, before later settling in Florence again, examples of his limitless inventiveness and enormous craftmanship as a goldsmith remain scarce.

A few gold etuis or scissors survive, certainly a reference to his fascination with precise surgical and other tools as the beginning of his career, some of them also executed under a microscope, according to his contemporaries (see for example a shagreen-cased gold etui complete with tools, sold Sotheby’s London, 26 May 2021, lot 24 and a pair of gold scissors, sold Sotheby’s London, 26 May 2021, lot 23).

In terms of objects of vertu combining gold and different versions of hardstone, however, only six gold and hardstone snuff boxes signed by Siriès are known today, including the present lot.

The first one is a Royal gold-mounted lapis lazuli presentation snuff box with a chased inner lid, circa 1744, relating to a lapis lazuli cameo in the Schatzkammer in Vienna (sold Sotheby’s London, 5 July 2023, lot 12). A second, stylistically comparable, formerly in the collection of Lord Hillingdon, is also made of gold and lapis lazuli (sold Sotheby’s 9 December 1963, lot 154; illustrated in Kenneth Snowman, Eighteenth Century Gold Boxes of Europe, London, 1966, plate 895).

Another of cartouche shape is carved in bloodstone, with chasing along the sides (illustrated in Annamaria Giusti, Arte e manifattura di corte a Firenze: dal tramonto dei Medici all'Impero, 1732-1815, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 2006, p. 92; sold Christie’s London, 5 December 2018, lot 79); a smaller circular example of mocha-coloured striated agate also survives (sold Christie’s Geneva 14 May 1991, lot 26). The fifth snuff box is a rectangular example in gold and lapis lazuli, incorporating chased Meissonier-like gold bands around graduated miniature lapis lazuli plaques on the sides (illustrated in Giusti, p. 97; Paris art market 2023).

The present lot most successfully combines rather boldly protruding hardstone panels with a play of inward and outward curves of the gold, of raised and set back surfaces, as well as both organic and angular shapes. It dates about a decade earlier than Siriès’ densely chased examples of the seventeen-forties.

The subtle elegance and somewhat minimalistic approach to the polished gold surfaces emphasising texture, colour and depth of the material – hardstone – can be seen in the context of the general fascination with nature’s wonders as early as the 1720s and 1730s, exemplified by a small group of gold-mounted hardstone snuff boxes made in Paris. One of them is an agate example with raised parts to the sides by the Parisian gold box maker Nicolas Bouillerot, dated 1726-1732, in a French private collection (see Sophie Mouquin, ‘Agate, Jasper and Sardonyx: Gemstones in French Mineralogical Collections of the Eighteenth Century’, in Alexis Kugel: Gold, Jasper and Carnelian, Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court, London, 2012, p. 75). Another similar example with raised sides, incorporating agate panels within plain polished gold borders, was sold at Sotheby's London, 22 May 2019, lot 509. This style of rather compact boxes with raised sides within gold rims arrived in Meissen about a decade later, as a gold-mounted fond celadon porcelain snuff box shows (sold Sotheby’s London, 10 December 2020, lot 9).