A Four-Colored Gold and Enamel Snuff Box, Daniel Marchand & Comp., Hanau, Circa 1765

Sotheby's New York, 21 June 1994, lot 121

The present lot is another example for the high number of gold and enamel snuff boxes that were for decades believed to be of Swiss - and specifically Geneva - origin due to the quality of the enamel, and also in the absence of an alternative attribution. After the ground-breaking research of Lorenz Seelig, however, it is now possible to identify yet another Hanau bijoutier as the maker of this box (Seelig, Lorenz, ‘Eighteenth century Hanau gold boxes’, Silver Society of Canada Journal, vol. 18, 2015, p. 40).

Daniel Marchand (1733-1794) was part of the first generation of prolific gold workers and fabricants in Hanau who seems to have used both the mark DM and DMC crowned almost contemporaneously. While the former was his own maker's mark, the later stands for Daniel Marchand & Compagnie and signifies that the box was produced during his partnership with the bijoutier Esaias Fernau between 1762 and 1780 (Seelig, op. cit., p. 41; see also lot 61 in this sale).

The partnership between the Marchand and the Fernau families was not exclusively business-related. Many of the bijoutiers in the Hanau Neustadt were related to one another, such as Daniel Marchand and Esaias Fernau, by marriage of Esaias to Marchand's sister Anne Madeleine Marchand on 19 July 1762 (Lorenz Seelig, 'Die Hanauer Golddosen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts - 2019 fuer das Historische Museum Hanau erworben', in Neues Magazin fuer Hanauische Geschichte, Hanau, 2020, p. 159).