Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Preview image of work. silver with gold plating, Tobacco Box 6779

1967.1

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Tobacco Box

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Artist

Artist Unidentified

Title

Tobacco Box

Creation Date

1831

Century

mid-19th century

Dimensions

2 1/8 in. x 3 3/8 in. (5.4 cm. x 8.57 cm.)

Object Type

box

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

silver with gold plating

Credit Line

Museum Purchase

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

1967.1

Tobacco boxes, similar in shape to snuff boxes, were often deeper in order to hold larger, thicker shreds of smoking tobacco. This box features an engraved description, “I. Bowdoin/ 1831,” possibly identifying the owner as James Temple Bowdoin, son of Elizabeth Bowdoin Temple. Tobacco, like snuff, was long used among Indigenous groups in the Americas. As tobacco culture swept through European and American society, fashionable smokers added this new, smaller type of object as personal possession. The tobacco box and its high quality demonstrate the consumer’s status in upper-class society. Tobacco production involved the enslavement of, first, Native Americans and, later, Africans to harvest and process the leaves into a usable commodity. With the end of the Civil War came economic and labor challenges to maintaining the agricultural boom of the antebellum period.

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