Gold snuff box / tabatiere and the hallmarks

[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

[2209patrick]

Hello.

I cropped and downsized a couple of your pictures.
For those of us who have a dial-up internet connection pictures that large take a long time to download.
I didn't wait for all the pictures. Don't know if there are other marks.



Pat.
.

[oel]

Thanks Pat.It looks good. There is one more mark in the rim of the lid. See picture of the rim.
Oel.

[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
.

[oel]

Hello Jakjo,

Thank you very much for your prompt and accurate reply. I do agree and most of us were deceived by de letter “V” because the book “Gold stempel aus aller Welt” by Jan Divis points us to Valdemarsvik. The engine turning technique is an old technique. In the 1700’s it was adopted for metal such as gold and silver (free from Wikipedia). For me the box is hard to date without a date letter and I do thank you for your appraisal. I have enclosed a rough drawing of the Crowned letter.

Regards,

Oel
http://f.imagehost.org/download/0045/Drawing_of_hallmark_in_the_box
.

[oel]

After consulting a paid 'expert on hallmarks' I can say we are looking at 'pseudo marks'. I never realized the 'pseudo marks' were used on gold items as well. My question could someone determine if the box is made by a Hanau or other German gold/silver smith. I checked the 925-1000 Hanau information but could not find a positive match.For those who are interested herewith the expert rapport. NB The box has been described by a German auction house to be French/Paris date letter for gold 1770/1771 (Marc Rosenberg band IV page 253 for gold of minimum 916/1000 fineness).

A- This box is defenitely NOT french and NOT 18th c.

The french law and presentation of the marks is very very 'streng' ! in het ndls .

Why:
We first have to look at the outside , form and decoration.
1- Decoration - ornamentation: here we have a Guilloché technique
It is too even - too perfect. - machine engine work - started to be used in that way in the 19th c.
zigzag design too perfect. - too straight..
Lacking the 18th century smoothness. and depth. - relief.
Period: 19th century and probably second half

2- Marks: totally Imitations interpretations
of 18th c french marks. - "in the idea of, "
what we call 'poinçons de fantaisie.'
Why ?
If it was french and 18th c and Paris.
We have to find: those four marks
Poinçon de Charge , poinçon de décharge, poinçon d'orfèvre and poinçon de Jurande (letter)
'Charge', 'décharge', 'jurande' and maker's marks
The "Jurande Lettre" that gives the date - is mostly crowned.

The marks here are totally different: of what we should find. !
The poinçon de décharge - small objects, (you should find that one on the rim) - Is Not here . !
The french makers mark - with it's typical form - according to the law at that moment,
is not present !
(ie: at least two initials with a "crowned fleurs de lys" above those letters and two "grains de remede." : two dots ( not that one here) absent. !

THE MARKS YOU HAVE ON THE BOX

if you look at them, the surroundings around the letter is too round - circular, - regular to be of the 18th c.
you do not have here, the "uneaven "and 'smooth - wearing off' of the 18thc century marks

The marks you have , you cannot find back those marks with clarity. and easiness.
and they do not coincide with the marks of the 18th c
and they are too small for 18th c. marks

THIS BOX IS NOT SWISS 18TH C
A few Parisian silversmiths ran from Paris after the French Revolution and migrated to Switzerland taking a few 'moulds of stamps ' with them) not this case.

WHERE HAS IT BEEN MADE ?
well lots fo imitations of marks were made in the Revival period :
second part of the 19th c , or first part of the 20th c.

Some are germans
Some can have been made in the Netherlands

Difficult to tell with precision.

Those marks cannot tell you where that box as been made and who made it.

I'll try to find a few more infos if I can , and i'll let you know.

Those objects help us to learn.
and to develop our 'eyes'

Sincerely yours

Martine D'Haeseleer

[dognose]

Hi Oel,

Many thanks for taking the time and effort of posting the report of the appraisal. The comments are most interesting.

Regards Trev.
.

[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;












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.