The lid is set with a somewhat stylised mid eighteenth-century miniature portrait of Friedrich II ‘the Great’, King of Prussia. It is probably based on an untraced portrait by Antoine Pesne (1683–1757), a French-born painter who worked for three generations of the Prussian royal family in Berlin. The stippled painting technique shows the influence of Anton Friedrich König (1722–1787), a pupil of Pesne, who produced multiple versions of a succession of images of Friedrich II, from a young prince to an old man.

Emperor Paul I of Russia (1754–1801) idolised Friedrich the Great and so it is not surprising that during Paul’s brief reign (1796–1801) snuffboxes commemorating the Prussian monarch were produced in Russia. The way the unusually shaped miniature is incorporated into the design of the lid indicates that this snuffbox was specifically made as a ‘frame’ for the portrait.

Jean Charles Blerzy, born 1758/59, was the son of Jean Charles René Blerzy maître menusier and his wife, Elisabeth Edme Beguin (Jean Charles Blerzy was listed as being aged ‘treize ans’ at the time of his mother’s death on 12 May 1772). He was the nephew of the goldsmith Joseph Etienne Blerzy. He moved to St Petersburg in 1793 and in the following year, on 13 August, became a member of the Foreign Goldsmiths’ Guild (Ausländisches Amt der Gold- Silber- und Galanteriarbeiter) in St Petersburg, registered as a galanterie worker. In 1809 he became a Russian subject, joining the Russian Guild two years later, in 1811.

minimize...