An ivory box with hinged lid, the lid set with a dial to record the score of a card game, the surface covered with decoration, including human figures, in green stain, applied with a wax resist, the detail added with penwork and paint. The inside of the lid is inscribed at the bottom 'Mariaval le Jeune à Paris fecit'. The box contain 29 counters of an original 35. The design of this box is related to the diamond suit of cards.

Ivory box, mostly stained green with a wax resist technique, with black pen decoration imitating engraving and with some painted decoration in a limited range of other colours on areas left white.
The sides of the box and the moulded edge of the lid are green. The lid is attached with two brass hinges, attached to the box with rivets passing from the inside, through a serpentine cross-bar which unites the two hinge fixings. On the lid, the plates of the hinges are attached by small screws from the inner surface of the back of the lid.

The underside of the box is decorated with a panel showing three flower heads, with floral decoration in the quadrants in the corners. The lid of the box is mounted with a central roundel with a heart-shaped piercing. This, when turned on its central pin, reveals Arabic numerals from 1 to 9 and the letter X, in a heart-shaped aperture. The revolving dial is painted with a diamond in red, between flowered panels. On either side of it are oval panels of pen decoration, that on the left showing a man with a bottle and a glass, that on the right showing a man with a tambourine. The inside of the lid shows a white panel decorated with flowers and two dovers and inscribed below 'Mariaval le Jeune à Paris fecit'.

The box contain 29 counters (18 long narrow octagons, of 20 originally; 4 shorter octagons, of 5 originally; 7 circular, of 10 originally), decorated in a similar technique.

18 long, narrow, rectangular counters (:2-:19). Each of these is 6.4 cm long and 0.9 cm wide. They are rectangular, with canted corners, each pierced with a pinhole in the middle of one short side. They are decorated with white shapes and a border in resist on a green ground, with a central pen-drawn flower head in black on white. The pinhole on all the coloured ground counters suggests that some sort of resist dye technique has been used and the counters strung on a thread to dye and dry them before the pen detail was added. The decoration is irregular, suggesting that a stencil was not used.

4 shorter, broader, rectangular counters (:20-:23). Each of these is 2.3 cm long and 1.2 cm wide. They show canted corners and are similarly decorated on each side to the longer counters, but with the numbers 10, 30, 40 or 50 in the centre of one side (20 is missing). These counters also show the pinhole in the middle of one short side.

7 circular counters (:24-:30). Each of these is 2.3 cm in diameter. They are decorated in gree, with details in black penwork and polychrome. One side of each shows a spotted border of green, with a central flowerhead in black on a white ground. One face of each is decorated with a vandyked border in black on white, and with different central motifs on each,with a motto as follows:
:24 knight's helmet; 'Je garentis'
:25 flaming heat; 'Je suis tré branlé'
:26 flower; 'Je tiens ma couronne'
:27 two hears with in a flaming heart; 'Les deux ne sont qu'un'
:28 flaming heart with wings; 'elles zemportent'
:29 flaming heart on a green ground; 'Qui se frotte si pique'
:30 flamiming heart with wounds; 'Je pleure vostre absent
'

Given by Miss Susanna Pearce Emery MBE

This box and the other three in the set were made and signed in the workshop of Mariaval le Jeune (Mariaval the Younger). He seems to have made a speciality of such boxes, stained with this form of wax resist, with details added in penwork and paint. Such boxes are traditionally attributed to a tabletier, a maker of small boxes, of this name, who worked in Paris and, possibly, Rouen. A notarial deed dated 1727 records the name of a Claude-François Mariaval who was engraver to the king (graveur du roi). This could be the maker of the boxes, or more likely, it was his son who made them. A Jean-Prosper Mariaval was active c. 1759 as a cartographer, who published a map of the route from Paris to Rouen via Mantes and Vernon. A note of his life may have given rise to the suggestion that the boxes were made in Rouen.

Such boxes were popular accessories in a society devoted to card playing and gambling.

Sets of boxes decorated in the same technique appear regularly at auction and others are held by museums, including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (inv. no. 2001.238.2), the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. M.17&A-X-1938) and the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. A set stained brown, yellow, red (and one unstained) was offered for sale by Sotheby's, New York, 14 June 1999, lot 18. This set was in a Russian outer case. A closely similar set was offered by Bonham's, London, 13 May 2008, lot 82 (sale number 16386)One or more of the boxs in most of these sets is signed by Mariaval. Another set was offered for sale by Serge Davidian, 'Le Curieux', Marché Biron, Stand 126, Saint-Ouen, in 2009. The ivory of this was either left natural or stained a light brown.

Formerly, the boxes were dated as early as 1690 but they must have been made in the years around the middle of the 18th century, although in a rather old-fashioned style of decoration. Another set in the V&A collections (Museum no. 1444-1902) shows portrait profiles of Louis Ferdinand, Dauphin of France (1729-1765) and his second wife, Marie Josephe de Saxe (1731-1767) who did not marry until 1747.

Such boxes were made in sets of four to hold counters for a card game, probably the game of reversis, an old Italian card game, from which the games of hombre and quadrille were derived in the 18th century. Such games were popular throughout Europe at the time, particularly quadrille. The four boxes were coloured green (for diamonds), red (for spades), yellow (for clubs) and white (for hearts). The counters for such boxes were made in three shapes. The longer octagonal ones carry no numerical value but the shorter octagonal ones are each marked with a multiple of ten, from 10 to 50. The disc-shaped counters carry individual mottoes but no values.

The three coloured boxes (green, red and yellow) of this four-box set of counter boxes were presumably decorated by a wax-resist technique of staining, which was then further decorated with penwork and painting. The coloured counters each show a minute pierced hole near the edge, suggesting that they were strung on a thread, after the wax was applied, and then dipped into coloured stain. The white counters have no such holes. This technique seems to have been used mainly for such boxes but the Fan Museum at Greenwhich, London, is said to have a fan with sticks decorated in such a manner.

This box is one of a set of four made to contain the counters necessary for playing a card game, probably reversis. This was an old Italian card game, the basis for two very popular 18th-century games, hombre and quadrille. Card playing was a necessary accomplishment for those hoping to take their place in polite society and all manner of people played at many levels of society. Such counter boxes would have been a luxurious and fashionable accessory for a card player of either sex.

The boxes and counters were colour coded to relate to the suits of a pack of cards. Green was for diamonds, red for spades, yellow for clubs and white for hearts. Although these boxes are signed by the maker, Mariaval, we know little about him, except that he obviously had a large trade in such items, as many sets survive. He may have been the son of the engraver to the king.

W.21A/1-1985