A Meissen porcelain snuff box with ruins
Vermeil-mounted rectangular tobacco box painted with figures amid ruins surrounded by coloured scrolls to the exterior and a mythological motif inside the lid. A restored breakage to the exterior. H 4, W 8.4, D 6.1 cm.
Unmarked, around 1753/54, decor attributed to Isaac Jacob Clauce.
The exquisite decoration of this tabatière can probably be attributed to Isaac Jacob or Jacques Clauce (1728 - 1803), one of the best miniature and enamel painters of his time. Born in Berlin, the son of a goldsmith from Metz, he received his training from 1739 to 1747 in Augsburg under the miniature painter and engraver Gustav Andreas Wolfgang (1692 - 1775). In 1753 he started working as a painter for the Meissen porcelain manufactory. A baptismal certificate of his daughter in November 1754 in Berlin proves that he returned there again and again. Presumably he was too expensive or too slow for the standard of the Meissen manufactory. King Frederick II finally intervened personally for his final return to Berlin, where in 1756 he worked first for the entrepreneur Wilhelm Caspar Wegely, then for Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, who was delighted to have won "the famous miniature painter, Mr Clause" for his porcelain manufactory. Clauce began working for KPM in 1763 and held the position of head of the painting workshop as of 1789.
Provenance
German private collection.
Literature
For more on Clauce see, among others, Baer, Druckgraphische Vorlagen, in: Baer/Baer/Grosskopf-Knaak, Von Gotzkowsky zur KPM. Aus der Frühzeit des friderizianischen Porzellans, Berlin 1986, p. 272 ff.
S.a. Rückert, Biographische Daten der Meißener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1990, p. 141.