Casket

The casket is a part of a ten-part toilet set containing also a pair of single-candle candlesticks, two pairs of caskets of various sizes, two seashell-shaped snuffboxes and a brush fitting (to Wil.519). Silvers from the set were made by a Berlin goldsmith active in the first half of the 18th century, who signed his works as Röhner. The unique artistic value of this set lies in the decoration of surfaces fully covered with enamel and adorned with caps of pure gold, called “Saxony enamel”. Such luxurious products were ordered and distributed by Pierre Fromery – an armourer and trader in haberdashery products, who arrived in Berlin from Paris in 1685. The set is one of the unique works adorning the richest treasuries of rulers in Munich, Vienna and Denmark and museum collections in Hamburg or Boston.

The central part of the cover decoration is the reserve filled with a landscape with a few golden caps. The imaginary landscape with single trees and shrubs is limited in the background, on the right, with the silhouette of a castle with an oval tower and a brick bridge crowned with arcades on a blue river. In the centre, there is a two-part building with a gable roof and a tower rising over it. Beside it, on the left, a lower building with the stepped profile of the façade is shown. The symmetrically composed golden caps present Neptune, Hercules, Minerva and Mars. In the background, there is a cap with an image of a chariot in clouds; on the right, there is the figure of walking Mercury. On both sides of Hercules, there are smaller caps with figures of the winged fame and a goddess with a lion at her side.

The casket, along with the entire set (called the Dressing Table in the 19th century), was shown to the Warsaw audience during An Exhibition of Antique and Art Objects in the palace of Count August Potocki and his wife at Krakowskie Przedmieście 32 (today the Museum of the University of Warsaw) in 1856. The set is described in the catalogue of this exhibition under item 513.

Joanna Paprocka-Gajek