Snuff box

Frank Hyams opened a watchmaker and jewellery business in Princess Street, Dunedin in 1885 (which operated until 1905). He secured  a first order of merit for the manufacture of gold, gem and pounamu jewellery at the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in 1890. 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, where he catered 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, while giving them a Pacific ‘flavour’. 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.’ He positions himself as the ‘Leading Manufacturer and Dealer in Greenstone’ and producer of the Largest and Most Varied Stock’.

In her recent MA thesis The Colonial Reinvention of the Hei Tiki: Pounamu, Knowledge and Empire, 1860s-1940s (Victoria Universtiy of Wellington), Kathryn Street argues that at the turn of the century, and particularly the 1901 Royal Tour, marked a ‘moment of self-reflection and colonial self-fashioning’ and that Pākehā increasingly ascribed new cultural values to greenstone, influenced by a growing knowledge of its worth in the Māori world.’ She states: ‘its colonial appeal and commercial availability placed it into the home and onto the body of almost anyone who desired it. Portable, precious and fashionable, this was the start of the boom times for the greenstone jewellery industry’. Hyams, with businesses in both Dunedin and London, was well placed to capitalise on this fashion.

In the making of this snuff box, Hyams has worked to exploit the translucent potential of pounamu.