Antique and Vintage Trinket Boxes

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A close cousin of jewelry boxes, trinket boxes serve the same purpose, although they are much smaller, leaning to the dimensions of pill boxes. Like pill boxes, trinket boxes were produced in an enormous variety of materials, including
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A close cousin of jewelry boxes, trinket boxes serve the same purpose, although they are much smaller, leaning to the dimensions of pill boxes. Like pill boxes, trinket boxes were produced in an enormous variety of materials, including sterling and silverplate, porcelain, enameled copper, and wood, which was sometimes lacquered or, as it was called in Europe, japanned. Among antique wooden lacquered trinket boxes, the ones made in Russia were especially well made, despite the fact that many of its "wooden" boxes were actually built out of fragile papier-mâché. Antique and vintage porcelain trinket boxes were produced by potteries in Staffordshire, Meissen, and Limoges, where porcelain boxes in the shapes of caskets, hearts, eggs, and round compacts were hand-painted, fired numerous times, and then fitted with metal hinges. While some of these boxes were pure porcelain, others were built on copper forms, which were drenched in porcelain slip and then fired before being painted and fired multiple times by artists. The use of these boxes was equally varied. While some of the first Limoges boxes were thought to have been made for sewing needles, others were filled with snuff or a few favorite pieces of fine jewelry that one wouldn't want to leave out on a dressing table to collect dust. Another great manufacturer of antique trinket boxes was Tiffany, which did a brisk business in what it called Fancy Goods such as inkwells for the office and humidors and matchsafes for the den. Some Tiffany pieces were produced in gilt bronze, others in sterling silver, and still more in enameled copper, sometimes paired with Favrile glass to create a small-scale stained-glass effect. Today, many of these boxes, created for now-arcane uses have been repurposed by collectors as trinket boxes, which means a stamp box topped by a frog may now house a go-to pair of cufflinks or earrings.

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