Antique Tobacco Boxes
Small lidded containers made to hold tobacco in its various forms: powdered snuff for the pocket or table, cut leaf kept moist in a jar, and cigars shut away in a cabinet.
Antique Tobacco Boxes
The heading covers a mixed group, and snuff dominates it. The word appears in 91 of 201 titles on Sellingantiques, so a listing under this category is more likely to be a snuff box than anything else. Twelve of those are table snuff boxes, the larger sort meant to sit out and be passed round rather than pocketed.
Boxes and jars for tobacco followed the leaf into Europe from the seventeenth century, keeping cut tobacco moist and portable, while snuff boxes developed alongside for powdered tobacco. Cigar humidors and smokers' cabinets came later, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea for storing cigars and accessories together.
After snuff come three recognisable groups. Tobacco jars account for 26 titles, many of them treen: turned lignum vitae, walnut, oak, yew-wood and staved mahogany barrels. Brass runs to 25 titles, and the engraved Dutch box is the sub-group inside it, with 22 titles naming Dutch work. Cigar and humidor pieces make up a smaller run, concentrated in what is currently for sale.
Dating is broad rather than exact. Sixty-three listings say only 19th century and 28 say 18th century, with Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian added as style labels. Only 47 carry a clean year, and those run 1800 to 1930. A single year in a title is the dealer's estimate unless the piece is hallmarked.
Where The Range Splits
Material sets the broad ladder. Gold and silver-gilt sit at the top, and the highest-priced pieces on Sellingantiques are 18ct and 14ct gold snuff boxes, one Paris box recorded at 98 grams. Lead, pewter, tin and pottery hold the bottom of the range, whatever the form.
Attribution lifts a piece sharply, and it is uncommon. The great majority of titles name nobody. Where a hallmark and maker are cited, or a signed painter, or a stated weight from a goldsmith, the piece sits high. Engraved dates, names and places do the same work: a Welsh box inscribed Beaumares 1802, a Reg. 1857, a commemorative Battle of Minden 1759, a trade label still inside a cabinet.
Novelty carries the middle. Boxes cut as a shoe, a horse's hoof, a wood plane, a bellows, a bird, a football or a hand holding a pinch of snuff turn up as one-offs, and Black Forest bears, owls, monkeys and dogs recur. Scale and completeness push the same way: 'large' appears in eight titles, and pairs and sets, or a cabinet with its original key and mechanism, sit above the single plain box.
Antique Tobacco Boxes Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for tobacco boxes, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
19th Century is the period label used most on Sellingantiques for tobacco boxes, with 18th Century next and Georgian third.
The Antique Tobacco Boxes Glossary
- Snuff box
- A small lidded box for powdered tobacco, carried in the pocket or kept on the table. Nearly half the titles in the category use the word.
- Table snuff box
- A larger snuff box meant to sit out and be passed round rather than pocketed. Twelve titles here specify it.
- Humidor
- A box or cabinet for cigars, sometimes fitted with a humidifier. Eleven titles use the term, and railway coal wagon models turn up more than once, one styled as a GWR wagon.
- Treen
- Small turned or carved domestic woodware, the word used in 16 titles. It covers the turned jars and barrels in fruitwood, walnut, oak and lignum vitae, a very dense tropical wood favoured for lathe work.
- Mull
- A Scottish snuff container, usually of horn, often mounted in silver or pewter.
- Piqué
- Inlay of gold or brass points and scrollwork set into tortoiseshell or horn. Related decorative terms in the category include papier mâché, moulded and lacquered paper pulp, and coquilla nut, a hard palm nut carved into pocket boxes and sometimes into a grotesque bugbear face.
Antique Tobacco Boxes: Frequently Asked Questions
Are most of these actually snuff boxes?
Yes. Snuff appears in 91 of 201 titles on Sellingantiques, so the pocket and table snuff box is the single most common thing under the heading.
Tobacco jars come next at 26 titles, then brass boxes at 25. Cigar humidors and smokers' cabinets make up a smaller run.
What makes a Dutch tobacco box different?
The recognisable type is an eighteenth-century engraved brass box, sometimes copper, and 22 titles name Dutch work.
Subjects can be pictorial. One copper box of the late seventeenth century depicts Calvin and Luther. Alongside the Dutch run sits a brass and copper tin commemorating the Battle of Minden of 1759.
How old are these boxes usually?
Dealers file them broadly. Sixty-three listings say only 19th century, 28 say 18th century, and Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian labels add style rather than years.
Where a clean year is given, and that is 47 listings out of 201, the run is 1800 to 1930, clustering in the 1890s, 1850s and 1900s.
A few pieces reach further back, including a set of three seventeenth-century tobacco boxes.
Which are the highest-priced examples?
Gold snuff boxes. The top of the range is 18ct and 14ct work, with one Paris box recorded at 98 grams and two silver-gilt boxes weighed at 82.7g and 83g.
Lead, pewter, tin and pottery pieces sit at the other end.
Do figural and novelty boxes turn up often?
They recur, though the oddest are one-offs: a japanned papier mâché horse's hoof, a copper and brass bellows, a fruitwood box carved as a wood plane, a hardwood football, and a hand holding a pinch of snuff.
Black Forest carving is a steadier presence, with bears, owls, monkeys and dogs, joined by pottery and terracotta bulldog and dog-head jars. Carved figural pieces reach the upper part of the range.
Where do these boxes come from?
Dutch and English work makes up the steady run, with Continental brass and copper boxes forming a clear group of their own.
Other origins are occasional: single Japanese, Scandinavian, Russian, Swiss, Middle Eastern, Anglo-Indian and African-American examples appear. Around 24 tobacco boxes come to market on Sellingantiques in a year, listed by 74 different dealers over time, so almost every dealer who handles them handles them singly.