A Meissen porcelain snuff box with a portrait of a lady in negligée
Rectangular tobacco box decorated on all six faces with softly painted bucolic scenes. The inside of the lid with a portrait miniature of a lady in a gilt tendril surround. With later 18k gold mountings. The porcelain unmarked, silver mountings with tête d'aigle, used as of 1838. H 4.2, W 9, D 6.7 cm.
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 for his daughter dated 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 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 was given a position at Berlin KPM in 1763 and became head of the painting workshop there in 1789.
Provenance
Private collection, Westphalia.
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.