The snuffbox is set with six glazed wax panels containing various insects and mosses, perhaps intended to resemble moss agate, or more probably amber with biological inclusions. Unfortunately, time has caused a clouding of the surface on some of the panels, obscuring the compositions. The most notable example of the use of this unusual technique is to be found on the medal cabinet acquired by Louis XVI sometime before 1789 from Guillaume Benneman (1750–after 1811), possibly through the agency of the marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre (c.1740–1796), for the pièce de la Vasselle d’or, Versailles. This cabinet is mounted with an array of wax panels set with insects as well as some bird portraits made out of feathers, the latter more resembling pietre dure panels. These panels have been attributed to Jean Jacques Hettlinger (1734–1803), a Swiss-born scientist with an interest in entomology and ornithology who was a sometime inspector and later co-director of the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. When he sought permission to leave France during the Terror in 1794, Hettlinger’s passport application was accompanied by three examples of ‘une Espèce de mosaïque naturelle’, which showed a technique that he had perfected, although he conceded he had not invented it.² Contemporaneously such work was created at Sèvres by the wives and daughters of the employees of the manufactory for sale to visitors. Before the wax panels of the Benneman medal cabinet were attributed to Hettlinger it had been suggested that they were by a ‘veuve Troyon’ whose husband worked at Sèvres. In December 1779 it is recorded that Hettlinger presented Louis XVI with ‘deux tabatières ornées d’oiseaux faits avec des plumes naturelles’; whether these studies were set in wax is not known.³ Vachette’s use of panels made in this unusual technique is indicative of the delight in novelty that is a consistent feature of his work throughout his long career.

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