The principal panels of the present box painted by the peintre en miniature du Roi Jacques Charlier (1706-1790) are based on two pendant paintings by François Boucher (1703-1770), signed and dated 1750, delivered to Madame Pompadour and probably intended for the Chateau de Bellevue, Les Deux Confidentes (Timken collects ion, National Gallery of Art, Washington, no. 1555), and Le Sommeil Interrompu, (Jules S. Bache collects ion, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. no 49.7.46).

The front and back panels, painted on cardboard, further relate to drawings by Boucher: La Chasse relates to a composition of a drawing which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London while the back side panel refers to La Pêche derived from one of the vignettes painted by Boucher for Madame de Pompadour for the octagonal boudoir at the Château de Crécy, now in the Frick collects ion (1916.1.08). The sides depict similar scenes, one is based on Boucher’s Le Joueur de Cornemuse (c. 1754) which has several versions and titles after an original painting now lost.

It is notable that the date of the execution of the pendant paintings Les Deux Confidentes and Le Sommeil Interrompu by Boucher for Madame de Pompadour and the creation of this box, in which they are represented in miniature, is remarkably close. Such chronological proximity when considered with the details revealed in the inventaire of Madame de Pompadour of 1764, where similar items are listed '2386-40 Une autre (une journée), à mignature de Charlier...576' leads one to suspect that this box was indeed made for Madame de Pompadour.

Jean Ducrollay (1710-1787) is still considered one of most important and most inventive bijoutiers and gold box makers active in Paris during 18^th century at the heyday of the gold snuff box. Ducrollay was apprenticed to Jean Drais (1686-1748). After attaining the maitrise in 1734, Ducrollay was later based in the famous workshop in the Place Dauphine which nurtured so many renowned gold box makers creating some of the most beautiful gold boxes ever made, often incorporating a wide range of materials, such as lacquer panels, hardstones, mother of pearl, or – as is the case for the present lot – painted portrait miniatures.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, a very popular type of gold box was the boîte-à-cage - a gold box with elegant cagework mounts holding panels of different materials in place for each side of a box - for the creation of which Ducrollay collaborated with some of the most talented portrait miniature painters, such as Le Sueur, Liot and Jacques Charlier (1706-1790).

The quality of both the painting and the gold work of the present lot, as well as its rarity, beauty, condition and probable provenance, were also recognised by the prestigious collects ors who owned the famous box in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among them was Elie de Rothschild (1917-2007), member of the French branch of the family, who also ran the family vineyard at Château Lafite Rothschild. In the middle of the twentieth century, the family moved to an eighteenth-century mansion at 11 rue Masseran, a most suitable backdrop for the impressive collects ion of French eighteenth century furniture and objets d’art.

In the 1970s, the box was chosen to be part of the group of museum-quality works of art that the British Rail Pension Fund amassed as a hedge against the soaring inflation in the United Kingdom at the t.mes . The collects ion was later gradually sold in a series of high-profile auctions, most notably in the objects of vertu sale at Replica Shoes ’s Geneva on 15 May 1990, where it was acquired by the present owner as part of an important European private collects ion.