Snuffbox with Hunting Scenes

Described in contemporary records as of Saxon origin, Andreas Philipp Oettner was a prolific and itinerant enamel painter who worked at most of the important German porcelain factories. He is documented at Vienna in 1756 and at Nymphenburg in 1756 – 57. In 1759 he was first at Frankenthal and then at Ludwigsburg, where he stayed until 1763 when he moved to Höchst. Leaving Höchst in 1766, he was recorded at Fürstenberg in 1767 where he was designated as a painter of Watteau subjects, landscapes, and battle scenes. He is considered by Reber(1) to have then worked in Holland and Thuringia, but the next and final record of his career is at Vienna, where he returned to work as a flower and landscape painter from 1768 to 1787. Oettner’s manner of painting figures with pupils staring from double-lidded eyes and high eyebrows is well illustrated here. His style is identifiable on snuffboxes — all unmarked, like this one — attributed to Frankenthal, Fürstenberg, and Ludwigsburg.(2) The clear paste and bright glaze of this box identify it as deriving from Höchst, where hunting subjects after engravings by Johann Elias Ridinger (1698 – 1767) were a regular part of the decorative repertoire. Although not specifically traced, the scenes on the exterior are certainly after Ridinger.

Catalogue entry from Claire Le Corbeiller. The Robert Collection. Decorative Arts, Volume XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 167-68.


NOTES:
1. Meister, Peter Wilhelm, and Horst Reber. European Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1983 [Translation of Europaisches Porzellan. Stuttgart, 1980.], pp. 33 – 34.
2. Beaucamp-Markowsky, Barbara. Boîtes en porcelaine des manufactures européennes au 18e siecle, 1985, respectively, nos. 284, 249, 301. Translated by Tamara Préaud. Fribourg.

Nathan Samuel Kaplan, Petrograd and Paris; Kaplan sale, Anderson Galleries, New York, 30 November-4 December 1926, lot 422, ill.; Eli B. Springs; Springs sale, American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, New York, 24 November 1934, lot 937.