The box is painted with subjects of peasants relaxing or occupied in country pursuits. The scenes are painted in the muted tones of green and brown highlighted with splashes of pink and blue so typical of Clauce’s work. The mounts and integral thumbpiece are finely engraved with flowers on a reeded ground.

Isaak Jacob Clauce, or Clause (1728–1803), was born in Berlin on 20 October 1728, the son of Louis Clauce, a goldsmith from Noiseville, Metz. According to his contemporary, the writer Frédéric Nicolai (1733–1811), Isaak Jacob trained for eight years from 1739–1747 with a miniature painter called Wolfgang, probably one of the Wolfgang brothers, Gustav Andreas (1692–1775) or Christian (1719–1750), miniature artists and engravers from Augsburg. After this training he applied himself to painting in enamel ‘qui avait alors une grande vogue à Berlin pour les tabatières, montres, etc.’2 In 1753, he spent a year at the Meissen factory, apparently working under Johann Martin Heinrici (1711–1786), before returning to Berlin in 1754–1755 to head the decorating workshop of the Wegely Porcelain Manufactory. Financial problems quickly sent Clauce back to Meissen but he finally returned for good to Berlin in 1761, taking up his previous job as head of the decorating atelier at the Gotzkowsky factory which had succeeded Wegely. He was appointed Court Painter to Friedrich II of Prussia in 1766. According to Nicolai, writing in 1769, at that date he was working for the king, and was living at the ‘Fabrique Royale des Porcelaines’.

Apart from painting on porcelain, Clauce is known to have decorated other types of Galanteriewaren, and he is thought to have decorated gold boxes. He is also known to have painted on enamelled copper snuffboxes, probably in his freelance years between 1747 and 1753 – a signed box painted with classical subjects is in the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels. On both gold and copper, Clauce’s stippled style of painting in muted colours is distinctive and particularly pleasing when he chooses contemporary genre subjects. Indeed, Friedrich II lent a cane handle painted by Clauce to the better-known and more prolific Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) as an example to copy when he became displeased with that artist’s current work, as recorded in the painter’s daybook in 1776.

minimize...