LATE 16TH CENTURY

Details

A Very Rare 18-Bore German Snap Matchlock Competition Target Rifle
Late 16th Century
With browned heavy swamped octagonal sighted multi-groove rifled barrel changing planes at the muzzle, lightly engraved with foliage at intervals and stamped at the breech with the initials 'HF' (perhaps Støckel 2832) flanking the sighting groove, brass fore-sight and later iron back-sight, grooved tang, later pan, pan-cover, and lock mechanism, figured walnut full stock (old repairs) incised twice with armoury number '165' and inlaid with white staghorn tendrils and pellets within white staghorn lines interrupted by beadwork, and pierced and engraved white staghorn panels (some replaced) in the form of grotesque figures, birds, animals, jesters, sportsmen, Adam and Eve, a standing figure carrying a trigger-guardless target rifle and two prize-winner's flags, and a marksman firing at a target, on the top of the butt a peasant defaecating, and behind the barrel tang the initials 'H G' and 'F'(?), rounded butt (extended) shaped for the fingers of the right hand, no provision for a ramrod, and large white staghorn fore-end cap engraved with crowned imperial double-headed eagle (some wear throughout)
41¼in. (104.7cm.) barrel

Literature

Arne Hoff, 'Late Firearms with Snap Matchlock', p. 22, plate 9
Richard Akehurst, Sporting Guns, p. 25, colour plate 1
The World of Guns, p. 46 (illustrated)

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

Ornate matchlock rifles of this distinctive type, of which some twenty are known, are mostly dated to the 1580s and 1590s. Many of them are now in public collections, but a very fine example was sold in these Rooms from the Collection of the Barons Nathaniel and Albert von Rothschild, 8 July 1999, lot 83 (£56,500 including premium)

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