Napoleon III Papier-mâché Box With Chinoiserie Decoration

The fashion for chinoiserie items experienced a significant boom in the mid-19th century. Not content with importing trinkets from Asia in abundance, people began to manufacture objects imitating this dream world. Thus appeared a whole range of furniture made of papier-mâché and pressed paper, or light wood, a completely new process, lacquered black and covered with gilded and sometimes polychrome Chinese decorations, covered with fantasy pagodas and small figures dressed in Asian dresses. The Mexican actress Maria Félix, famous in the 1950s, had built up an extraordinary collection of this furniture which was dispersed at Drouot in the 1980s. Our box belongs to this amusing fashion. It consists of a large box containing 6 betting boxes. Under the boxes in the cells for storing them, there are spaces to probably store card games. The boxes are filled with numerous bone tokens of different sizes. The present period card games are deprived of their honors, which corresponds to a way of playing. The case and the boxes are in excellent condition, the exterior decoration little worn the interior new. It has its key. We simply deplore that the hinge axes did not hold, because the lid seems a little too heavy in view of their finesse.
Under the , there is a little stamp with the name of the shop " A la ville de Lisieux ".