A pair of canisters with carved pounamu finials

Frank Hyams opened a watchmaker and jewellery business in Princess Street, Dunedin in 1885. Five years later he secured a first order of merit for the manufacture of gold, gem and pounamu jewellery at the 1890 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition. Hyams married Henrietta ‘Ettie’ Hallenstein, who was one of four daughters of Mary and Bendix, Hallenstein who founded a clothing, retail and manufacturing empire in Otago. Following Ettie’s premature death in 1895 following the birth of the couple’s son, Hyams married Ettie’s London-based cousin Hilda Hallenstein in 1897. The following year he established a second branch of his business in New Bond Street, London alongside Faberge and other high end makers, catering to prestigious clientele, including government officials and aristocrats, including the Rothchilds. He was invited to sit in the Colonial Stand in Whitehall to watch the coronation procession of Edward VII in 1902.

Hyams sold a wide variety of jewellery, watches, tableware, clocks and china through his stores, and positioned himself as the ‘Leading Manufacturer and Dealer in Greenstone’. As his advertisements illustrate, he decorated his premises with artefacts from around the Pacific, and promoted himself as a specialist ‘South Sea Island and Maori Curios / NZ Greenstone Cutting and Mounting’. Of greenstone, Hyams wrote in one of his catalogues: ‘greenstone is unique as our own exclusive property, and identified with the Maori Race from the earliest knowledge we have of it. And while Greenstone lacks the brilliancy and transparency of the Emerald and other stones of the "Gem" tribe, the finer quality of the Stone is capable of receiving a high polish which brings out its latent beauty, and renders it a most fitting stone for the manufacture of personal ornaments or the more useful table requisites. Thus it is eminently suitable for the Visitor to New Zealand to take away with him as a memento of Maoriland.’

As well as creating obviously inspired Māori 'charms', Hyams also incorporated pounamu into a wide range of standard European items, including snuff boxes, table ware, containers and a variety of novelty desk items such as ink wells and clips. This pair of canisters with pounamu heads complement the pair of novelty desk ornaments from 1905 (GH024448). Both pairs have the same form of pointed, carved head - one smiling, one grimacing. It has been suggested that the smiling and crying heads are based on an 18th century decorative arts tradition which in turn recall the so-called Laughing and Weeping Philosophers, Heraclitus and Democritus.