Decorator, Les Collections, Celebres, D'Oeuvres D'Art, Botte En Or, XVIII SIECLE, Coll de M L. Double, Plate 34, 1864

PETITOT, in England, under the eyes of Van Dyck, &, in France, delivered to his own genius which was of a very French quality, painted the court & the city. We hardly dare to write the reason for the excessive rarity of his portraits on enamel: it is because he had them baked on gold plates & that, as the fashion passed, they were taken to the crucible of goldsmiths! This medallion probably did not come from the La Tour d'Auvergne family. It was mounted on a tobacco box in 1780 by Mathis de Beaulieu, goldsmith to Louis XVI.

The box bears the hallmark of Mathis de Beaulieu. In itself & apart from the enormous value given to it by the Turenne medallion, it is a marvel of delicate carving & colored harmony. The chisel was, so to speak, subordinated to the brush, and the goldsmith was doubled as a painter. There are three kinds of gold that blend & play like clouds in a setting sun: yellow gold for the general background; red gold for the stem, foliage & acanthus leaves; green gold for the bits of foliage & the braided garland that meanders. The small rosettes are in burnished silver & shine like daisies.

On the reverse, a funerary vase, singularly placed on a snuff box, rises against a background of burnished gold; it is circumscribed in an oval medallion, which, like the enamel on the lid, breaks pleasantly in the opposite direction to the general oval of the whole.

This box appeared in the big sale of the Demidoff collection in January 1863. It was the day after this sale, in which it had been sold to a dealer from the Palais-Royal, that it entered the collection of Mrs. Leopold Double