Lot Essay
Jean Joseph Charrière is recorded as gunmaker and crossbow manufacturer between 1744 and 1756. His father Joseph is recorded in 1731 in the rue du Chantre
Sold with two manuscript letters dated respectively 12 December, 1838 and 30 December 1852 referring to this gun, a mitre-cap (of an officer of grenadiers of a Scottish regiment in the service of France circa 1745-60, to be offered for sale in The Jacobite Sale to be held by Christie's Scotland on 12 June 1996) and an unidentified sword all claimed to have belonged to Charles Edward Stuart. The earlier letter is addressed to Thomas Churchill Thompson and politely refuses his offer to add these 'valuable relics' to those 'which have been saved from the wreck of a Family which it has pleased Heaven to have all but detroyed' is signed 'Charles Edward Stuart'. The writer was Charles Hay Alan, the younger of two mysterious and romantic Sobieski Stuart brothers, who claimed to be the grandchildren of the Young Pretender, and who wrote a famous and highly controversial book on Scottish dress, the Vestiarum Scoticum (1842). The other letter is from R.W. Billings offering to sell the pieces to William Murray for ¨35 and giving an account of their recent history
For the Sobieski Stuarts see J. Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress, 1962, p. 113
Sold with two manuscript letters dated respectively 12 December, 1838 and 30 December 1852 referring to this gun, a mitre-cap (of an officer of grenadiers of a Scottish regiment in the service of France circa 1745-60, to be offered for sale in The Jacobite Sale to be held by Christie's Scotland on 12 June 1996) and an unidentified sword all claimed to have belonged to Charles Edward Stuart. The earlier letter is addressed to Thomas Churchill Thompson and politely refuses his offer to add these 'valuable relics' to those 'which have been saved from the wreck of a Family which it has pleased Heaven to have all but detroyed' is signed 'Charles Edward Stuart'. The writer was Charles Hay Alan, the younger of two mysterious and romantic Sobieski Stuart brothers, who claimed to be the grandchildren of the Young Pretender, and who wrote a famous and highly controversial book on Scottish dress, the Vestiarum Scoticum (1842). The other letter is from R.W. Billings offering to sell the pieces to William Murray for ¨35 and giving an account of their recent history
For the Sobieski Stuarts see J. Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress, 1962, p. 113