This small box is engine-turned in a whorl pattern under deep blue enamel and painted en plein in opaque enamels directly onto the translucent blue enamel which thus fancifully forms a sky above and the sea below the subject. Such a technique may have been a poor man’s version of the opalescent dawn and sunset skies so popular with enamel painters such as Jean Louis Richter, or even their precursor.

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