A gold and enamel snuff box, probably Hanau, circa 1790,

The present lot belongs to a small group of gold boxes which were probably made in Hanau between 1765 and 1785, struck with a similar set of marks: AP crowned, AP over C crowned, or MP and MP crowned, often surrounded by leafy sprigs. The Wallace Collection owns four such boxes (Charles Truman, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Gold Boxes, London, 2013, cat. nos 73 - 76). It is probable that these two boxes were made by the same makers in different business groupings, with the letter C probably being an abbreviation of ‘Compagnie’. The South German city of Hanau, arguably the most important and industrious place for the production of high quality Galanteriewaren from the late 18^th to the mid-19^th century, previously mainly dominated by Berlin and Dresden, had established a system of ‘Fabriken’, very similar to the ‘Fabrique’ in Geneva. Members of this network of goldsmiths, engine-turners, casemakers, lapidaries, watchmakers and enamellers, often worked together in order to achieve certain benefits such as tax reliefs, and many of these families of Huguenot origins were related to each other through various marriages in Hanau and Geneva (see Julia Clarke, 'The Geneva Fabrique: Watch case makers to enamel painters', in: The Majesty of the Chinese Market Watch, Ian White and Julia Clarke, London, 2019).