MARKED:

Maker's marks for Frédéric-Jules Rudolphi (on left edge of lid and base)

Rudolphi is noted for his silver jewellery, often mounted with figures, as well as for vases, coffrets and other small-scale objects. At the London Great Exhibition, 1851, his display included a 'Silver chased casket; Bacchanalian on a tiger. [an] Enamelled chased silver casket, "Children Fighting". [and a] Lapis lazuli watch casket; subject, "Massacre of the Innocents" ...' (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition 1851, lll, London, 1851, p. 1246).

Rudolphi, along with Emile Froment-Meurice and Alexandre Gueyron came in for special praise in Ralph Worum's essay 'The Exhibition as an Essay in Taste' (The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of Industry for All Nations, London, 1851, p. lX***).

A coffret by Gueyron from the Great Exhibition, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, can be compared to the present example (see Simon Jervis (intro.), Art & Design in Europe and America 1800-1900, London, 1987, pp. 82-83; for works by Rudolphi see pp. 92-93).

The figures of children seated on the front and back edges of the lid on the present coffret appear to be by the same hand as those on a bracelet and brooch also exhibited at the Great Exhibition, and now in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (Catalogue sommaire illustré des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1988, p. 191).

The framing to the protruding heads is the same design as that on a brooch shown at the Great Exhibition (The Art Journal, op. cit., p. 274; the heads themselves (see detail on title page) may be derived from those on Ghiberti's Porta del Paradiso for the Baptistry in Florence.

It is possible that the sculptor A.V. Geoffroy-Dechaume (1816-92) was responsible for elements of the design of this coffret (see Anne Dion-Tenenbaum, 'Geoffroy-Dechaume et l'orfeverie', de Plâtre et d'Or, exh. cat., L'Isle-Adam, 1998, pp. 73-87, and particularly fig. 9).