This skilfully carved layered agate brooch by the Franco-German artist Jean Georges Bissinger shows Bissinger’s father-in-law, Carl Rudolf Brunnarius, a publisher and merchant who furnished princely interiors. The brooch is a memorial piece made after his death in 1872, probably for his daughter, Berthe, wife of the engraver, or for her mother. He is conventionally dressed, and is himself depicted wearing a brooch set with a cameo of a man pinned beneath his shirt collar, perhaps one made for him by his son-in-law.

C. R. Brunnarius built a ‘Maison spéciale pour l’ameublement de palais’ on the Boulevard St Denis which in its field was ‘one of the most important enterprises in Paris’. He supplied furnishings for the Kronprinzenpalais in Stuttgart.

Bissinger exhibited at the Paris exhibitions of 1867 and 1878 and was still working in 1904 when the journal Public Opinion admired his work: ‘M. Georges Bissinger's cameos are small as a rule; they are engraved particularly in the antique style, and as such are remarkably successful.’ At the Paris exhibition of 1878 he showed a series of 112 gems copied from examples in the Cabinet des Médailles. The jeweller Alexis Falize noted his use of a lathe to simulate lace in his report on the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876.