This is an ivory box-lid made in the first half of the nineteenth century as a forgery of or a tribute to the style of the fifteenth century. It depicts a courting couple resting from a hawk hunt.
Ivory combs, together with mirror cases, boxes and gravoirs for parting the hair, formed an essential part of the trousse de toilette or étui (dressing case) of the typical wealthy lady or gentleman in the period. The two leading cities for ivory carving were Paris and Dieppe. Luxury items, such as combs were often made in Paris, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the seventeenth century Dieppe became increasingly significant for small-scale sculpture in ivory, perhaps because it was a port.
But here the facial types and general demeanour of the figures point unequivocally to a nineteenth-century date of production. Although taking fourteenth-century mirror cases as a general inspiration, the roundel is too small to have functioned in that way. If it had a use at all - and this is far from certain - the hole at the centre indicate that it was as cylindrical box lid. It is quite possible that it was not intended as a fake but rather as a neo-Gothic, proto-Pre-Raphaelite, tribute to fourteenth-century models.