A THREE-COLOUR GOLD AND ENAMEL SNUFF BOX, JEAN-JOSEPH BARRIÈRE, PARIS, 1771

Eugen Gutmann collection;

Fritz Gutmann collection 

The first twentieth-century owner of this box, Dresden-born Eugen Gutmann (1840-1925), was the co-founder of the Dresdner Bank in 1872 and a highly important and passionate collector, most notably of Renaissance gold and silver work and of the decorative arts. The art historian Otto von Falke (1862-1942) produced a scholarly survey and catalogue of Gutmann’s collection in 1912, Die Kunstsammlung Eugen Gutmann (see fig. 2), which has become a key document in reconstructing Eugen Gutmann’s expansive collection and in which the present box is illustrated (see fig. 1).

Until 1914, Eugen’s youngest son Friedrich (“Fritz”, 1886-1944) was a Managing Director of the Dresdner Bank’s London branch, but at the outbreak of World War I he was interned as a so-called enemy alien by the British on the Isle of Man. At the end of hostilities with Germany, Fritz left England for Amsterdam, where he continued his work for the Dresdner Bank and settled with his wife Louise (née von Landau) in the country house Huize Bosbeek in Hemsteede, near Haarlem in northern Holland. In 1921, the entire collection had become part of a family trust to benefit Eugen’s six surviving children (his eldest son, Walter, having died in 1917) and Fritz was appointed to administer the trust. Fritz looked after his father’s collection on behalf of his family while also building up his own private collection of paintings, including important examples of Old Masters and Impressionist art, as well as Decorative Arts, among them the box in the present lot, of which Fritz most likely lost possession between May 1940 and February 1942.

The fate of the two collections and of Fritz and Louise Gutmann and their wider family, including Fritz’s brother Herbert (1879-1942), also a noted collector, is powerfully reconstructed and recounted in The Orpheus Clock (2015), written by Fritz’s grandson Simon Goodman. At the heart of that remarkable book is the narrative that although baptized into the Christian faith, the extended Gutmann family was persecuted by the National Socialists after 1933 because of their Jewish heritage. Some members of the family – such as Herbert, who fled to England and died there in 1942, losing the art collection that he had been forced to leave behind; Fritz and Louise’s daughter Lili, who went to Italy in 1938; and their son Bernard, who was already studying in England – managed to escape the Nazi terror by going abroad. Fritz and Louise were not so lucky: they were deported together from Hemsteede to Theresienstadt in 1943, where Fritz died in 1944 and from where Louise was taken to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Through the art dealer Karl Haberstock, the Nazis acquired by forced sale shortly before the couple were deported all of the Eugen Gutmann collection that remained in safekeeping at Huize Bosbeek. The paintings from Fritz’s own collection that he had not managed to save by sending them abroad for safekeeping were also looted. When Fritz and Louise’s children Lili and Bernard (who had anglicized his surname to Goodman) returned to their family home of after World War II, they found it completely stripped of every trace of Eugen’s and Fritz’s magnificent art collections. Exhaustive and tireless efforts were made by Bernard until his death in 1994 to locate and recover the works, but to no avail. After Bernard’s death, Simon Goodman took over his father’s life’s work and over the last twenty-five years he has managed to trace many pieces, including the present box: it was found at a regional auction house in Scandinavia and subsequently restituted to the Gutmann family by its private owners.

Otto von Falke, Die Kunstsammlung Eugen Gutmann, Berlin, 1912, cat. no. 248

The maker of the present lot, Jean-Joseph Barrière, became master in 1763, sponsored by Henri Delobel, after having been apprenticed to Charles-Nicolas-Loys Dumossay from 1750. He worked on the Pont Notre-Dame until 1786, when his shop had to be closed down for building works on the bridge, forcing him to move his workshop to the rue Coq Saint-Honoré, where he remained until at least 1793. Barrière was a productive goldsmith – eight of his boxes are to be found in the collection of Fürst Carl Anselm von Thurn und Taxis, most of them purchased directly after they were made (Lorenz Seelig, Golddosen des 18. Jahrhunderts aus dem Besitz der Fürsten von Thurn und Taxis, Munich, 2007, nos. 7, 8, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22 and 25), and the musée du Louvre holds ten of his boxes, whilst both the Wallace and Gilbert collections also own several examples.

Barrière's work is characterised by lavishly chased gold and excellent enamel work in contrasting colours, often imitating hardstones or marble in accordance with the fashion in Paris. The present box can be compared with another Barrière box of the same year, from the Otiz-Patiño collection (A.K. Snowman, Eighteenth Century Gold Boxes of Paris, London, 1974, no. 46; Bonhams, 18 June 2014, lot 31), with similar en camaïeu enamel medallions, painted after François Boucher (1703 –1770), within borders simulating turquoise beads.

Not only did Barrière imitate the stone which was first brought to Europe via Turkey, hence the name, but also other natural hardstones. In accordance with the fashion in Paris at the time, the enamel on his gold boxes would also imitate lapis lazuli (see Lorenz Seelig, Golddosen des 18. Jahrhunderts aus dem Besitz der Fürsten von Thurn und Taxis, Munich, 2007, no. 7), and a much rarer example in the same collection is enamelled in a sparkly coppery colour, made to look like aventurine quartz (ib., no. 22). On another gold box, also dating 1771, formerly belonging to Baron Henri James de Rothschild, the enamel is painted to imitate pale brown and beige agate around sepia enamel panels (Sotheby’s Paris, 10 April 2008, lot 75).

For the present box, Barrière’s choice was the imitation of pink marble, beautifully contrasting with the ice blue enamel panels on the sides and the turquoise beads on the borders, giving the box a rather contemporary appearance, two and a half centuries after it was made.