A two colour gold and enamel snuff box, probably Hanau, circa 1820

In this box, two different kinds of gold working have been successfully combined: chasing and engine-turning. The latter had been of increasing interest to the bijoutiers in Hanau, Germany. Since the early 1760s, Etienne Flamant, an engine-turner from Geneva, had been working for a number of Hanau bijoutiers, such as Les Frères Toussaint. Not only was Flamant a skilled guillocheur, but, even more importantly, he had invented a type of lathe-turning machine which was previously unknown in Hanau, which enabled him to produce a large number of elaborately decorated engine-turned gold boxes (Lorenz Seelig, Eighteenth century Hanau gold boxes, The Silver Society of Canada, p. 34). When Flamant expressed his wish to return to his home town of Geneva, the leading gold box makers in the German town known for its large Huguenot population of craftsmen, tried to convince Flamant to stay by promising him an unusually high annual supply of 624 gold boxes for whose engine-turning he would be paid. This in conjunction with very favourable terms, led Flamant to sign another contract for six years in 1773. Ever since, the guillochage played a very important role in Hanau gold boxes until the second half of the 19^th century, when it was still used for the decoration of bigger, often cartouche-shaped presentation boxes by firms such as Charles Colins & Söhne (see also lot 53), and Weishaupt & Söhne.