Snuifdoos met panterdessin c. 1780 - 1790

This snuff box with a panther design was made anonymously, likely in Europe, using materials like gold and enamel. These boxes were luxury items, often seen as status symbols among the elite in the 18th and 19th centuries. Owning and using such a box was a social performance, a display of wealth and refinement. The ‘panther’ pattern, which resembles more of a leopard, connects to colonial trade and exoticism. The rise of snuff use coincided with increased global trade and colonial expansion, and these boxes, as luxury items, became implicated in those power dynamics. Research into trade routes, sumptuary laws, and social etiquette can tell us a lot about who might have owned such an object, and what it would have meant to them. The meaning and value of art is always attached to its social and institutional context.