Lot Essay
The sarcophagus-scrolled box, with reed-wrapped and antique-fluted sides, celebrates the Element of Water with a rudder-bearing river deity reclined amongst reeds beside a water-issuing urn. The deity, framed by a triumphal-arched bridge, is perched on a shell-scalloped cartouche amongst picturesque undulating architectural scrolls. A related picturesque box, depicting a figure symbolising the River Tiber, bears the date 1741 and signature of George Michael Moser (d.1783), who was famed as a chaser from Geneva (A.K. Snowman, Eighteenth Century Gold Goxes of Europe, Woodbridge, 1966, p.275).