AFA Autumn 2021

Autumn 86 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Liddell, the first Earl of Ravensworth, in 1836. Unfortunately, although Audubon refers to this gift in at least two letters, we know nothing more about it. 15 The most elaborate, valuable, and symbolically most significant snuff box owned by Audubon was a diamond- encrusted presentation piece from Nicholas I, the Emperor of Russia. It was transmitted to him by the tsar’s emissary, Alexis Krudener, in the summer of 1841. 16 Although Audubon undoubtedly enjoyed the social cache associated with this gift, he appreciated its monetary value more, for he wrote his friend Benjamin Phillips to ask how much the snuff box might be worth if he were to sell it. Phillips replied, “with reference to the snuff box, … I now find that from £45 to £50 is the amount which may probably be obtained for it. 17 Supposing the diamonds to be taken out and paste substituted for them, the cost of the substitutes would not be above £4 or £5. The cost of mounting the diamonds, supposing them to be removed, would depend upon the manner in which it is done. I shall hold the box for your orders.” 18 If Audubon did attempt to sell the box, he was unsuccessful, or perhaps he had a change of heart and decided to keep it as a prestigious showpiece. In any case, the box was still in the family’s possession in the 1860s, when Lucy asked her brother, William, how to go about selling it. 19 The snuff box under discussion here, his second, is an elegantly simple silver box of rectangular shape (fig. 2). It bears an 1831 date stamp and the maker’s mark of the Birmingham silversmith Nathaniel Mills on both the inside of the lid and the inside of the bottom of the box. It has incurved (concave) sides, engine turned surface decoration, and an applied garland on the front. The name “Audubon” is engraved in cursive script on a rectangular reserve on the top of the box. Nathaniel Mills was in partnership with his sons, William and Thomas, in the firm Nathanial Mills & Sons, in Birmingham in the 1830s. They excelled in making small silver items such as vinaigrettes, snuff boxes, and card cases for both domestic consumption and export. Samuel Wilson probably bought the snuff box from a silversmith or import-export merchant in Charleston and presented it to Audubon within a few months of its manufacture. Because of its plain, unadorned appearance and practical design, it was the snuff box the artist appears to have adopted for daily use, and it is the only one of Audubon’s snuff boxes that has survived to the present day (or is, at least, the only one whose present whereabouts is known). Its ownership in subsequent years tells us something about the sad state of Lucy Audubon’s financial situation in the years following the loss of her husband. A DISTRESSED WIDOW MAKES A GIFT In the spring of 1862, just over a decade after John’s death, Lucy, then seventy-five, was finding it increasingly difficult to handle the deteriorating condition of her family affairs. Predeceased by three of her four children (her daughters Lucy and Rose in 1814 and 1819, respectively, and her oldest son, Victor Gifford, in 1860), Lucy had come to rely on her second son, John Woodhouse Audubon, to handle the financial affairs of the family. When he died in 1862 at the age of forty-nine, “without leaving a dollar in the bank,” Lucy turned to her lawyer and long-time family friend, George Burgess, for counsel. 20 Burgess helped Lucy to rent out, and later sell, the family properties in New York, and did his best to guide her through the “tangled and confused state” of her family’s finances. 21 He also quietly solicited Audubon’s friends to help underwrite her living expenses. In a letter to her husband’s former patron and traveling companion, Edward Harris, in New Jersey, Burgess discretely explained that Audubon’s distressed widow and granddaughters, who lived with her, were “somewhat cramped for ready cash for daily current living expenses and have to call on their friends” for help. 22 Lucy was more direct in describing her situation when she wrote Harris a few days later to thank him for his “loan.” “I really am unhappy and very destitute” she confessed. 23 Fig. 7: Amelia Jane Havell, Portrait of Robert Havell, Jr., 1845. Graphite and watercolor on paper, 5 ¾ x 4⅛ inches. Drawn by Havell’s eldest daughter at Sing Sing (Ossining), New York. Current location unknown.