AFA Autumn 2021

2021 Antiques & Fine Art 85 project would not only prove a “profitable speculation” for both of them, but that it might keep Audubon “from snuff and grog” in his final years. 10 Unfortunately, his old friend’s habits were too firmly ingrained to permit such a healthful change. “I do not believe that I will ever be a teetotaler,” he wrote Bachman in 1843. “I drink good wine and take a good deal of snuff, and if I can continue to do so for the next 20 years, I will not care a jot about the science of teatotallism.”  11 When Audubon died in 1851, a dozen years short of his goal, the Nathanial Mills snuff box that he had received as a gift twenty years before, was still by his side. AUDUBON’S SNUFF BOXES Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, snuff boxes were frequently exchanged between friends, or presented as tokens of high esteem (Fig. 6 ). Audubon was given at least four during his lifetime. The first he recorded was a silver box with the engraving of a pheasant on its lid. Made in Manchester, England, in 1826, it was given to Audubon by John Rutter Chorley, a British railway official Audubon had met in Liverpool shortly after his arrival there. 12 Because the engraved bird was derived from the illustration of another artist, Audubon was probably less than enthusiastic about owning or using this box, despite his respect for its donor. In 1828, he reported putting it away forever when he first tried to give up the use of snuff. “Now, my Lucy,” he wrote his wife on January 1, “when I wished thee a happy New Year this morning I emptied my snuff box, dump[ed] the box in my trunk, and will take NO MORE. The habit within a few weeks has grown upon me, so farewell to it; it is a useless and not very clean habit, besides being an expensive one.”  13 Like many New Years’ resolutions, Audubon’s decision to give up snuff was too hard for him to maintain, for, as he noted in his journal, “I missed my snuff . . . the strength of habit thus acting without thought.”  14 Certainly by 1831 he was again using snuff regularly and was more than happy to receive copious quantities of it, along with the new snuff box presented to him by his friend in Charleston. He was given his third English snuff box by Thomas Henry Fig. 6: The Presentation, ca. 1845. Text below the image states “THE PRESENATION/of a Gold Snuff Box to the Rev. K. T. Breckenridge/in Bethel Church. By Rev. Darius Stokes in behalf of the colored people of Baltimore as a gift of gratitude. A.D. Dec. 18 th 1845.” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-07916).