The interior has two handwritten labels inscribed: ‘Chrysopras’ and ‘No 32’. This snuffbox is carved from a single block of hardstone. The contour of the side, softly swelling at the base and raised on a narrow foot, is reminiscent of examples carved in Berlin in the second half of the eighteenth century. The back and edge of the base has green figuring, while that on the lid appears at the front, thus indicating that the slice of hardstone cut for the lid was flipped on the shorter axis of the oval. The reason for this was to exploit the pictorial character of the hardstone, allowing the panel to be read as a view into a cave with cascades. This treatment references a use of hardstone developed in Florence in the Grand Ducal workshops of the Galleria dei Lavori in the early seventeenth century, where panels of locally sourced Albarese marble were cut to suggest landscapes, and were known as Pietra paesina. The four-colour gold mounts, chased with flowers and scrolls, act as a foil, in both texture and colour, to the highly polished, predominantly brown hardstone.

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