A handsome distinguished gentleman, his hair thinning and gray, I'm really unsure if the portrait dates him to French Revolution (from clothing) or if he's later, as late as 1830. I'll err to the side of caution, but he could be 50 years earlier. The largish table snuff onto which his hand painted portrait has been mounted is a beautiful older one. I suspect the gold frame would test as karat gold, but I am reluctant to take it out to test, or to scrape the visible surface for acid test. A lot of these old ones are gold. This is not the type of item a person who could not afford 18k gold would have made in that time. The box is shell. a thin rim shows the coloration well. The box is 3.25" in diameter and 1" tall when closed. A stunningly fine portrait for size, when I can enlarge it as I've done and it is still finely detailed. That face is only about 3/4" chin to top of head, remember.
Very good for age and type, the snuff box shows a small area of either chip or bug loss on the bottom rim, magnified in our images for your review. The painting has a hairline to the right side of the main alignment of the figure, age/shrinkage hairline, visible in our images but not very distracting in a piece this old. I didn't want to dislodge the portrait and its convex cover glass and golden mount to see if there might be a signature, or date, or more information because it seems fragile on the inner lid where it is mounted (see images). I will leave that decision to the next owner of this elegant portrait snuff.
