Circular tortoiseshell box and cover, mounted with a still-life of a basket of flowers on a marble surface with a textile backdrop; the gold border pierced with ovals, with a black ground; the sides and base of the box piqué with gold posé in stripes of tooled gold, with gold rim mounts. The painting signed Valeller Coster.

Anne Vallayer-Coster was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peintre et Sculpture, in Paris, in 1770, aged 26. She was one of only four female artists to be admitted to the Académie before the French Revolution. Anne was the daughter of a goldsmith and learned painting from her father, rather than through a formal apprenticeship, although she did study informally with the marine painter Joseph Vernet and the botanist Madeleine Basseport. As a woman at the Académie she was excluded from studying figure painting and concentrated on still-life painting, portraits and genre scenes, considered more suitable to her sex. Nevertheless her work in flower painting won great praise for its realism and by 1779 she came to the notice of Marie-Antoinette. Her work appears on a number of small boxes of this type.