Footnotes

It is thanks to the research undertaken by Hadyn Williams that we now have a credible solution to "The FJ Conundrum", see p 409-11, 18th century Snuff Boxes in the David and Mikhail Iakobatchvili Collection, (Monaco, 2024).
For decades scholars, auctioneers and collectors have been intrigued by the origin of a large number of boxes bearing the incuse maker's mark FJ, often found in conjunction with a series of unexplainable marks, sunbursts, "crossed-s's" and various marks looking like Parisian 18th century marks as well having an incuse stamped number to the flange of the cover.

Lorenz Selig's research and discovery of the considerable production of gold boxes made in Hanau in Germany , see p.74-91, ed. Murdoch and Zech, Going for Gold (2014), gave us an idea that this group of boxes might have been made there but he did not find evidence leading to a maker who might have used FJ as a mark.

Williams has now connected the boxes to the firm of Frères Jordan in Berlin, in the 1786 histories written by Huguenots Jean Pierre Erman and Chrétian Frédéric Reclam, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des réfugiés François dans les états du roi. They state that when the great goldsmith Jean François Theremin returned to Berlin he brought with him a number of artists skilled in the creation of bijouterie and that he became associated with les Frères Jordan, the Prussian Crown Jewellers in Berlin.

The boxes by Frères Jordan in the present collection exhibit several of the variations of the marks discussed, including Lot 10, which has the FJ to the hinged cover and to the base the sunburst, showing an unquestionable connection between. The differences and varieties of the marks may have been to do with the fact that the workshops were scattered around Berlin.