Romantic Boxes

A classic antique solid Silver Cigar Box / Cigarette Box with a highly polished silver exterior. The interior of the Silver Box has a cedar wood lined base and the lid is gilded. The interior has a removable wooden...

A special unique piece! Hand-painted, probably from France, late 19th century. Beautiful floral patterns in colorful and golden paint.

A decorative folk art hand-painted wood box with a hinged lid. A fabulous little box perfect for toy storage or small miscellaneous items. The top of the piece is hand-painted with t...

Antique lidded box in hand painted porcelain with flowers and gold decoration on a purple background. Sevres style, early 20th century. Measures:...

Italian Grand Tour 800 Silver, Enameled Malachite & Painted Roman Scene Box. This fantastic antique box is rectangular in form heavily decorated with hand chased foliate scroll work...

A rare French silver nielloed snuff box featuring a mythological hunting scene on the cover within a finely detailed wooded landscape, a hound barking up a tree is being restrained b...

Herend lidded trinket box in porcelain with hand-painted purple flowers and gold decoration. Lid modelled with a rose bud. Mid-20th century. Measures: 14...

German 800 silver box, ca 1910. Rectangular with straight sides. Cover flat and hinged; tapering sides applied with flower head border. Embossed Olden Days scenes of merrymaking with...

This is a good papier mâché, rectangular shaped black lacquered lidded box, hand enamelled and gilded, made in Japan during the 19th century, early Meiji period. This rectangular shaped papier mâché box has a well fitting hinged lid, with the box base and lid slightly domed. The box was probably originally made as a pocket box but could easily sit on a desk or dressing table as required. This is a very decorative box with finely hand painted scenes of three people, one holding a parasol, in a garden setting, with a pagoda type building, large gate...

Rounded square pill box in 925/1000 sterling silver gold plated with white fired enamel, above and below, with hand painted horse head. Dimensions cm. 5.2 x 5.2 x 2.3. Weight gr. 117. Designed by Franco Salimbeni in 1966 on the inspiration of previous artefacts made in the English Art Nouveau style of the early 1900s and manufactured in the Salimbeni company headquarters in Florence in numerous specimens also with different subjects, with completely manual execution by artisan artists with a slab of high thickness suitable for supporting numerous enamelled firings at around 800°C. Miniature is a very ancient technique which consists of painting works in small proportions. It was born for the decoration of the first letter of the paragraph of the books. Over the years, however, this technique is refined and enriched, then moving on to precious personal items. Hand-painted miniatures can be done with multiple different techniques. The most important that we use on our articles are of three kinds: 1) Fire enamel. 2) Water tempera on an ivory plate. 3) Painted on mother-of-pearl. Fire enameled miniatures: On a first layer of enamel generally white or very clear or even transparent suitably liquefied at a temperature of about 750 ° C, the chosen subject is painted using miniature colors which are as many colored crystals, ground and reduced to a very fine, almost impalpable powder washed and purified in distilled water with the addition of small quantities of deoxidizing acids which, diluted with essential oils (usually essential oil of solder), can be mixed to form a palette of colors. With very fine sable hair brushes you draw the subject starting from the perimeter and then gradually adding various layers of color. It is necessary to carry out various firings very often so that the colors harden and are not absorbed by the underlying glaze as, during the subsequent firings at 750 ° C, during liquefaction, it would spread irremediably. Hence the need to form the painting a little at a time, cooking it numerous times. Therefore it is necessary to proceed with numerous retouching, often overlapping different colors that only the painter's experience knows. A beautiful miniature needs from 20 to over 50 firings and is finished when the painter deems he does not have to further intervene. Some colors must have darker tones than others because then, by superimposing the transparent enamel placed at the end of the miniature, they fade. This transparent layer, called “fondant” in jargon, must be smoothed and polished like all other translucent enamel colors. The miniatures with water tempera colors are painted on real...

A fine antique French or German porcelain snuff box. Dating to the 18th (or possibly early 19th) century. Decorated throughout with...

LAST ONE of our spectacular antique foo dog box collection. This box features an adorable foo dog playing with ribbons. The large head with big innocent ey...