142 Important Presentation Snuff Box with the portrait of Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of King Louis XV.
The walls of cut quartz with the finest hand-cut guilloché. The setting gold with finely engraved floral decorations. Glassed portrait miniature of Madame de Pompadour as a half portrait in front of landscape background set into the lid.
Beautifully crafted courtly presentation snuff box of the finest quality.
Despite the quasi-official status of the Marquise de Pompadour as mistress of the king, few comparable objects are known.
Exquisite historical piece of the utmost rarity.
34 x 74 x 51 mm. Weight: 116,3 g.
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise (Margravine) de Pompadour, Duchesse (Duchess) de Menars (* December 29, 1721 in Paris; † April 15, 1764 in Versailles) was the famous mistress of the French King Louis XV.
She exerted considerable influence on the king's politics and governmental affairs.
The Marquise mainly influenced foreign policy, including military leadership, laws, and strategic planning. She also advised the king in the Seven Years' War to ally with Austria against England and Prussia. Here she fulfilled all the expectations of the Austrians. She urged ratification of the second Treaty of Versailles and obtained permission to send three armies, instead of the planned 24,000 men, to Austria for support. After the lost battle of Roßbach, she still did not want to make peace, as peace would have meant the ruin of her work. Her saying "Après nous le déluge" (German: "After us the deluge") after the lost battle is legendary. Therefore, after her death, she was held responsible for all the failures of the Seven Years' War. She supported the Duke of Choiseul.
Because of her middle-class background, she was an outsider at court despite her title of nobility; her status depended entirely on the king's fickle favor. She also had to constantly assert herself against numerous rivals and begrudging courtiers.
Madame de Pompadour used her position as official mistress to promote numerous intellectuals and artists - "progressive" in the eyes of the ancien régime - including the authors of the Encyclopédie Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the painters François Boucher, Jean-Marc Nattier, and François-Hubert Drouais. Voltaire was also one of their favorites
The foundation of the Manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sèvres can also be attributed to the mistress, with the aim of outdoing Saxon porcelain. However, the first samples were not crowned with success until the kaolin of Saint-Yrieix was discovered in 1765. Sèvres was then declared a royal manufactory. But the breakthrough did not come until the mistress herself presented Sèvres porcelain through exhibitions at the Palace of Versailles. In doing so, she tried to woo buyers with all the means at her disposal, and even made the porcelain a patriotic cause: "It is to fail in one's civic duty not to buy this porcelain while one has money."