A GEORGE II GOLD SNUFF-BOX

It has been suggested that C S is the mark of Christoph Jakob Sedelmayr. Born in 1716 he was a goldworker and Galanteriearbeiter who became a master in Augsburg in 1742 (H. Seling, Die Kunst der Augsburger Goldschmiede, vol. III, no. 2341) and who had spent some years previously in London on his Wanderjahre, the travelling years undertaken by craftsmen between their apprenticeships and their return to Augsburg. In London he made such progress that 'seine Arbeiten den engländischen in Zeichnung und genauer Ausführung ganz gleich zu schätzen waren' ['his work was equal to those of the English with regard to both drawing and detail'] (P. von Stetten, Kunst- Gewerk- und Handwerks Geschichte der Reichs-Stadt Augsburg, Augsburg, 1779-88, p. 488, quoted in R. Edgcumbe, The Art of the Gold Chaser, London, 2000, p. 16).
Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier's engraved designs for snuff-boxes in the rocaille style published in his Livre d'Ornemens, Paris, 1734, influenced many goldsmiths on the Continent and in England throughout the Rococo period, K. Snowman, Eighteenth-Century Gold Boxes of Europe, Woodbridge, 1990, pp. 44, 45 and 137.