A gold-mounted hardstone, burgau and shell 'Steinkabinett'-Tabatiere, Johann Christian Neuber, Dresden, circa 1785

Collection of Rafael Eberhardt (1868-1921), Berlin, early 20th century;
thence by descent

Rafael Eberhardt, born Halevi, was born in Germany in 1868 and lived in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Eberhardt was a senior director at the Berlin branch of Dresdner Bank, founded by Dresden-born Eugen Gutmann (1840-1925) in 1872, and he and his wife Elisheva (Ilsa) Eberhardt (1883-1934) owned a beautiful collection of decorative arts. Like many Jewish collectors in the late 19^th and the early 20^th century, such as Emma Budge, Margarete Oppenheim or Eugen Gutmann, a gold box by the celebrated Dresden court jeweller Johann Christian Neuber, was also among the objets d’art that the Eberhardt family assembled. Many of the gold boxes and the collectibles in some of the aforementioned great Jewish collections in Germany were looted under Nazi occupation and subsequently sold in forced sales (see for example Sammlung Margarete Oppenheim, Julius Böhler, München, sale 18-22 May 1936; or Paul Graupe, Die Sammlung Frau Emma Budge, Berlin, sale, 28 – 29 September 1937), and some of those that survived the turmoils of the war were only restituted in the past couple of decades. The present Steinkabinett was luckily saved from this destiny when the widowed Elisheva Eberhardt fled from Nazi Germany to Israel in 1934, only taking her child and the family’s most precious belongings with her on the long and onerous journey from Berlin to Israel, among them the present lot, tucked under her dress and held in place by a belt around her waist.

Walter Holzhausen, Johann Christian Neuber, Dresden, 1935, no. 39, ill.; p. 19;
Alexis Kugel, Gold, Jasper and Carnelian, Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court, London, 2012, cat. no. 186, p. 369