In 1770 Moravian missionaries, tasked with evangelising the aboriginal population of the Labrador region of Canada, came across a stone which the Innu and Inuit peoples believed was a fire stone created by the aurora borealis. Further deposits of the hardstone, named labradorite after the area in which it was first discovered by Europeans, were subsequently found in Finland, Russia and Ukraine, thereby providing a more convenient source for Western goldsmiths. In the later 1770s goldsmiths such as Johann Christian Neuber began to introduce small pieces of labradorite into their work, as seen in a box in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.¹ Within a few years larger pieces of the hardstone were employed, as on the present box, and eventually entire panels were used, as for cat. no. 98. The design of this box is similar to another made by the German-born Johann Christian Kayser in 1782, formerly in the collection of Empress Catherine II and today in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.² The lids of both boxes are conceived as a pattern of segments radiating from a central oval reserve that is bordered by a chased laurel frame. In both instances the gold of the frame is lemon-coloured as opposed to the red gold used elsewhere. However, that on the present box is possibly a later replacement. Kayser was a master of the Foreign Goldsmiths’ Guild – Ausländisches Amt der Gold- Silber- und Galanteriarbeiter – in St Petersburg from 1773 until his death in 1801.

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