Gold snuff box / tabatiere and the hallmarks

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oel
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Gold snuff box / tabatiere and the hallmarks

Post by oel »

Dear Forum,

The box has been sold to me described; 14K yellow gold octogonal box, hinged lid, each panel engine turned overall (guilloche ) corners engraved. L9,5 cm x W 5 cm. H 2 cm. Weight 83,5 gram. French marks and Swedish gold assay/ town mark for Valdemarksvik. In its original shagreen leather box.
To me the marks are unknown and/or pseudo marks.

Who could tell me more about the script capital letter with a crown above it, the 2nd mark could be the V for Valdemarksvik(S), the third mark looks like a flower. The box acid test showed 18 carat gold 750/1000. Somehow I am puzzled. Could someone please enlighten me about the hallmarks and the age of the box.

Regards,

Oel

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oel
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Post by oel »

There is one more mark in the rim of the lid. See picture of the rim.
Oel.
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JAKJO
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Post by JAKJO »

Hi Oel,

This is not a Swedish snuff box, because it lacks the
1. three crowns hallmark, which came into force as a national state control mark on 1 January 1754,
2. standard mark for articles of gold stamped with the carat standard; in this case 18K,
3. year letter from 1759 prevalent in the whole country,
4. maker's mark of the initials- or surname type in a rectangle.

The Gothenburg town mark is not a match because I read the crowned letter as a capital "S" and the "V" can not be Valdemarsvik, because there has never been and will never be produced such a good work of quality as your box gives proof of. The only possible towns where this box could have been made are in my opinion Stockholm, Gothenburg and Karlskrona. I recently saw a similar Swedish, hallmarked in Stockholm in 1842.

I am inclined to say that your nice box is Swiss and made perhaps in Geneva between 1800 and 1820, give or take ten years.

The old Swiss marks seem to be a mess and to make it a bit more complicated Geneva was under French occupation 1809-1815 and French marks for gold have been used in the Department of Lake Geneva.

Sad to say, I can not even guess if the "S" is the town mark or the "V" and the maker's mark...

I do hope that we will get an answer to our questions and in the meantime that this will be of help.

Best regards/ JAKJO
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oel
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Re: Gold snuff box / tabatiere and the hallmarks

Post by oel »

Eighteenth century Hanau gold boxes

Below an excerpt of Dr. Lorent Seelig's article; Eighteenth century Hanau gold boxes written for the silver society of Canada journal 2015. See PDF file;
http://www.silversocietyofcanada.ca/sit ... Seelig.pdf

Excerpt:
The large-scale production of gold boxes in Hanau did not begin with the firms Carl Martin Weishaupt & Söhne and Charles Colins Söhne in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but rather that Hanau had flourished without interruption as a European center of box making from the 1760s.

Also to be considered here is that in Hanau it was up to each bijoutier to choose his marks and its variations


Hanau’s goldsmiths had to work with gold of 18 carats or more; the 18-carat items were to be marked with a shell, and the 19-carat items with a bird’s head. These marks were deliberately chosen to resemble the Parisian discharge marks of 1756-1762 and 1750-1756, and served to identify the standard of gold for internal purposes as well as to maintain some affinity with Parisian hallmarks. In fact, sanctioning the production of items using 18- and 19-carat gold gave Hanau’s manufacturers a distinct economic advantage over their competitors in Paris, who had to abide by a standard of 20.25 carats. Any gold work produced in Hanau had to be struck not just with a standard mark, but also with a bijoutiers mark that would facilitate the identification of the maker. The decision to dispense with a town mark, however, can be traced back to an agreement made in 1752 between the government and the bijoutiers. Although the government had initially insisted that all precious metal objects leaving the town should be complete with the town mark of Hanau, the bijoutiers successfully argued that their work could not be sold as Parisian by merchants in other cities if it displayed a mark from Hanau.

In the 1770s, Hanau’s leading bijoutiers took a decisive step towards maintaining the high standard already achieved by the town’s gold box makers, which depended on the quality of the boxes’ engine-turned decoration, or guillochage. Etienne Flamant, a guillocheur from Geneva, had worked for several bijoutiers in Hanau since 1762. Flamant was in possession of a guilloche, or lathe-turning machine, of his own invention, the likes of which had never before been seen in Hanau.

I took the liberty to contact Dr. Lorentz Seelig and he wrote back to me;

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Fine gold box probably fashioned around the last years of the 18th century, the shell mark probably is the shell mark of Hanau for 18-carat gold (see my article “Eighttenth century Hanau gold boxes” in: Silver Society of Canada Journal 2015, fig. 44). The mark in the form of a stylized blossom is perhaps identical or at least very similar to the mark on a gold box in the Musée du Louvre which I attribute to the Frères Souchay (Serge Grandjean, Catalogue des tabatières, boîtes et étuis des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles du musée du Louvre, Paris 1981, no. 575, fig. of the marks on p. 444, see the scan; L.S., “Les boîtes en or de Hanau du XVIIIe siècle conservées au musée du Louvre”, in: La Revue des musées de France – Revue du Louvre 64, 2014, no. 3, p. 94-103, see p. 86-87, fig. 6). I don’t know the other marks of your gold box: a crowned S in a circle (is it really a S? I see an E) and a V. I have never seen these two marks on Hanau snuff boxes. But nevertheless I presume that your gold box is from Hanau.

With best wishes Lorenz Seelig


My personal conclusion; the crowned script letter E (?) could be an pseudo French year letter for 1745/46 , reference Marc Rosenberg Ausland & Byzanz Lf.Nr. 6412. The flower marks as shown in fig. 41, 48, 50, 54 I believe are based upon French discharge marks for Paris 1768-1774 Couronne royale. Reference Marc Rosenberg Ausland & Byzanz Lf. Nr. 6524 AB 6525. The V in a circle an unknown bijoutier/ maker/retailer's mark. State of the art guilloché work done by a Hanau master at the end of the 18th century.

Cheers,

Peter

Gratitude; Theodrich, to point me toward Lorentz Seelig's article, Dick Dekker's support&comment, Dr. Lorentz Seelig.
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