The fashion for boxes painted with landscapes or more often seascapes in monochrome, usually à camaïeu brun or occasionally rose, started in Paris around 1778, evolving from the slightly earlier and even more popular mode for boxes en agate arborisé – painted to simulate dendritic agate. This type of decoration swiftly caught the eye of the Hanau box manufacturers whose enamel painters were to make the style their own. Ignaz Peter Krafft (1745–1810) is known to have signed at least two examples painted in camaïeu rose. Krafft, father of the painter Johann Peter Krafft (1780–1856), is first recorded in Hanau in 1777 when he married Katharina Donné in the Protestant Marienkirche on 14 June. He became a fellow of the newly formed Hanau Drawing Academy in 1782 and worked for the local gold box trade before moving to Vienna in 1799.
Boxes painted with marine landscapes are recorded from many of the leading Hanau box producers and were decorated by several different enamel artists who did not sign their works, including Krafft and his workshop. Although the Hanau painters decorated dendritic agate boxes in camaïeu brun as in Paris, their marine landscape boxes often appear in pink or purple monochrome, harking back to the decoration on Meissen or enamelled copper boxes of the mid-eighteenth century. 

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