Executed in flickering brushstrokes, the fixé sous verre panels on this box illustrate a narrative on the theme of innocence lost, enacted by figures dressed in seventeenth-century costumes in tenebrous settings. As such they reference two types of genre of painting then collected by French connoisseurs: paintings of sentiment, exemplified by the work of Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), and seventeenth-century paintings from the Low Countries. Concerning the latter, the celebrated dealer Edme François Gersaint (1694–1750) noted in 1744 in his introduction to the sale catalogue of the collection of Louis Quentin de Lorangère (d. 1744) ‘l’école flamande … est ici fort à la mode & … plaît universellement’. In the succeeding years the next generation of connoisseurs, among them Etienne François de Choiseul, Duc de Choiseul (1719–1785), competed avidly to acquire works from other noted collections. The duke combined his enthusiasm for the Low Countries masters with an equal passion for the paintings of Greuze, of which he owned twenty one examples. Many works from his collection can be identified in the miniatures by Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe depicting the interior of the duke’s Paris residence, set in a box by Louis Roucel.
The fixé sous verre panels may be attributed to Jean Etienne Le Bel. The transition from his more controlled technique to the present looser handling may be traced via his decoration of ostrich eggs in the 1770s, such as one mounted on a stand carved by Madame Adélaïde in the collection of the Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. The curved form of the glass panels on the side of the present snuffbox was an innovation of the later 1770s that allowed the possibility of creating oval fixé sous verre snuffboxes.

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