According to his younger sister Hedvig Elisabet Charlotta of Holstein Gottorp (1759-1818), Gustav III, King of Sweden (1746-1792), 'loves all kinds of ornament, especially jewels'. It is known that he borrowed his mother's jewels in preparation for his journey to Russia in 1777, and when it became obvious that those would not suffice in the slightest to compete with the splendour at the court of Catherine the Great, he leased diamonds from the Swedish court jeweller Per Suther for the duration of his journey (Magnus Olausson, 'Gustav III - A Bejewelled Monarch', in: Catherine the Great & Gustav III, Nationalmuseum and State Hermitage Museum, Stockholm and St. Petersburg 1998-99, p. 557). Gustav III (fig. 1) was King of Sweden from 1771 to 1792 and today is chiefly remembered for his ‘enlightened absolutist’ style of rule. After seizing power in a coup d’état on 19 August 1772, known as ‘The Swedish Revolution’, he settled some of the rancour that had characterised Swedish government by lessening the influence of the Estates in Sweden’s parliamentary body (Riksdag) in favour of monarchical power. Although he essentially re-introduced absolute monarchy in Sweden, Gustav III opened the government to all citizens, and as such ended the political privileges of the nobility. Like some of his ‘enlightened’ counterparts in other European nations, he introduced liberalising reforms that bolstered religious freedom and abolished torture. Although Gustav III had won one of Sweden’s greatest naval victories at the 1790 Battle of Svensksund, his 1789 Union and Security Bill proved fundamentally unpopular among the powerful aristocracy, whose privileges had continuously been reduced. Some of this opponents, mostly members of the Swedish nobility, combined forces in the winter of 1791, ultimately leading to the assassination of the King by Captain Jacob Johan Anckarström at a masquerade ball in the Royal Opera House in Stockholm at midnight on 16 March 1792, an event which Verdi would later dramatise in his 1859 opera Un ballo in maschera.

Gustavus III, as he is known in Sweden, was the eldest son of Adolf Frederick (1710–12 February 1771), King of Sweden from 1751 until his death, and his Queen consort Louisa Ulrika of Prussia. He married Princess Sophia Magdalena (1746–1813), daughter of King Frederick V of Denmark, in 1766. Gustav also strongly promoted the arts and founded many cultural institutions which still exist today, including the Swedish Academy and the Royal Swedish Opera. Gustav III’s passion for the arts and especially for jewellery and objects of vertu may have been hereditary or at least influenced by the fact that his uncle was Frederick the Great, one of the greatest collects ors and patron of Galanteriewaren, and gold boxes in particular.

Maker’s marks including leafy sprigs, such as on the present lot, occur on a number of high-quality chased gold boxes (see Serge Grandjean, Les tabatières du musée du Louvre, Paris, 1981, no. 506, and other examples in private collects ions; see also Charles Truman, The Wallace collects ion Catalogue of Gold Boxes, London, 2013, cat. nos 73-76). The design, decoration and workmanship of these boxes would suggest a German origin, most probably Hanau or Berlin, and they seem to date from circa 1765 to 1780. For this particular box, the very sophisticated engine-turning would indeed suggest a Hanau origin and a date around 1775, or at least after 1773, when Etienne Flamant, a highly skilled engine-turner originally from Geneva, had signed a contract with the Huguenot goldsmith community in Hanau, according to which he would be guaranteed an annual supply of 624 gold boxes to decorate (see Lorenz Seelig, Eighteenth century Hanau gold boxes, The Silver Society of Canada Journal, 2015, p. 34). Following Flamant’s invention of a lathe-turning machine which was previously unknown in Hanau, the contract was part of the endeavour of the Hanau bijoutiers Les Freres Toussaint, Les Freres Souchay, Esaias Obicker, Daniel Marchand and Esaias Obicker, to maintain a high standard for gold boxes produced in Hanau.

A date around the mid-1770s for the present lot would also match perfectly with the date of the enamel portrait miniature, probably painted by Georg Henrichsen (1707-1779) at the height of his career, a couple of years after he was appointed Swedish court painter in 1773. Another very similar version of this portrait miniature, decorating the lid of a gold-mounted tortoiseshell bonbonnière, belongs to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (inv. no. NMB 2394).

At first it may seem somewhat unusual that a gold box of German origin would have been used for a presentation from the Swedish king to an English lord, but it is worth remembering that, particularly in the nineteenth century, it would become quite common for economical royalty to adapt earlier or foreign-made boxes for presentation use. The British royal family, for example, frequently used the Court Jewellers R & S Garrard & Co. for this purpose, as demonstrated by a jewelled gold and enamel Royal presentation box presented in April 1869 by Edward, Prince of Wales, to Paul Demetrius, Count Kotzebue (1801-1884), and sold at Replica Shoes ’s London, 4 July 2018, lot 90.