Large Decorative Syrian Box Inlay with Mother-of-Pearl

Exquisite handcrafted white mother of pearl inlaid and hand carved lidded box. Small octagonal Anglo Indian decorative box intricately decorated with Moorish motif designs which hav...

Large Asian decorative wooden jewelry box with brass overlay. Large ethnic Indian hand painted decorative jewelry wood box with brass metal hammered design overlay. Original beauti...

Exquisite handcrafted Middle Eastern Lebanese mosaic marquetry wood box. Small octagonal walnut Syrian style box intricately decorated with Moorish...

Fine antique Anglo-Indian hand carved wooden jewelry box inlaid. Nice Indian Mughal pen box handcrafted in very fine Sadeli micro mosaic...

Large Teak Jewelry Dowry Box with Brass, Late 19th Century, India. This Teak Indian Dowry Box is adorned with Decorative Brass, showcasing exquisite c...

Middle Eastern Mosaic wood box with Inlays of bone and mother of Pearl, C. 1950s Exquisite handcrafted Egyptian decorative wood box with mosaic ...

This handled box is a Japanese tabako-bon, or 'tobacco tray,' used to store tobacco and smoking accessories. Believed to have evolved from the traditional...

Nice wooden and mother-of-pearl box from the 1900s. The mother-of-pearl inlays form plant motifs (flowers and foliage), incised to give volume to the different parts. It closes with ...

Decorative box with hand inlaid mother of pearl shell rectangular tiles.

Glimmering with iridescent mother-of-pearl inlay, this English papier-mâché snuff box dates to the late 19th century. Black lacquer envelopes the papier-mâché case to form a durable ...

This antique box is from London made from papier-mâché The top is hand painted and inlaid with mother of pearl. It is finely painted and has an interior with defined Spaces for writ...

An exceptional Indo-Portuguese colonial mother-of-pearl veneered casket with silver mounts India, Gujarat, 2nd half of the 16th century, the silver mounts Goa or probably Lisbon Measures: H. 16 x W. 24.6 x D. 16.1 cm An exceptional Gujarati casket with a rectangular box and truncated pyramidal lid (with slopes on each side and a flat top) made from exotic wood, probably teak (Tectona grandis), covered with a mother-of-pearl mosaic. The tesserae, cut from the shell of the green turban sea snail (Turbo marmoratus, a marine gastropod) in the shape of fish scales, are pinned to the wooden structure with silver ball-headed nails. The casket is set on bracket feet on the corners. The masterfully engraved decoration of the silver mounts follows the most refined and erudite Mannerist repertoire of rinceaux and ferroneries dating from the mid-16th century. The high quality and refinement of the silver mounts and, likewise, the silver nails that replaced the original brass pins used to hold the mother-of-pearl tesserae in place indicate the work of a silversmith probably working in Lisbon in the second half of the 16th century. The Indian origin of this production, namely from Cambay (Khambhat) and Surat in the present state of Gujarat in north India, is, as for the last three decades, consensual and fully demonstrated, not only by documentary and literary evidence - such as descriptions, travelogues and contemporary archival documentation - but also by the survival in situ of 16th-century wooden structures covered in mother-of-pearl tesserae. A fine example is a canopy decorating the tomb (dargah) of the Sufi saint, Sheik Salim Chisti (1478-1572) in Fatehpur Sikri in Agra district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. This is an artistic production, geometric in character and Islamic in nature, where usually the mother-of-pearl tesserae form complex designs of fish scales or, similar to the dishes also made using the same technique, with the thin brass sheets and pins, stylized lotus flowers. The truncated pyramidal shape corresponds, like their contemporary tortoiseshell counterparts also made in Gujarat, to a piece of furniture used in the Indian subcontinent within the Islamic world prior to the arrival of the first Portuguese. This shape, in fact, is very old and peculiar to East-Asian caskets, chests or boxes used to contain and protect Buddhist texts, the sutras. A similar chest is the famous and large reliquary chest from Lisbon cathedral that once contained the relics of the city's patron saint, Saint Vincent. Both match in shape, having the same kind of socle or pedestal and bracket feet, and in their engraved silver mountings, featuring the same type of refined, erudite decoration. Their differences lie in the silver borders that frame the entire length of the edges of the chest (both the box and the lid), pinned with silver nails, and on the lock plate, shaped like a coat of arms in the Lisbon example. Given the exceptional dimensions of the reliquary casket...