Snuffbox with Voltaire and Rousseau

Description The busts of the celebrated philosophers François-Marie Arouet Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, rendered in ivory, have been applied to the lid of a papier-mâché box tinted to resemble maple wood. A wooden box in the British Museum with similar portraits is said to commemorate the deaths of the two men, both of whom died in 1778.

Provenance William T. / Henry Walters Collection, Baltimore [date of acquisition unknown], by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Credit Acquired by William T. or Henry Walters