BY JOSEPH HALL, DUBLIN, CIRCA 1770

Details

AN EXTREMELY RARE IRISH 70-BORE EIGHT-SHOT FLINTLOCK REVOLVER
By Joseph Hall, Dublin, circa 1770
With octagonal sighted barrel signed on the top flat, hand-rotated cylinder released by the trigger-guard, the chambers numbered respectively from '1' to '8', and each fitted with manually-operated sliding pan-cover marked repectively from 'A' to 'H' and held in place by a flat spring, florally engraved tang, bevelled back-action lock signed within a rococo scroll, engraved cock (top jaw and screw replaced), later steel held above the cylinder by an arm attached to the side of the barrel, walnut fore-stock and swelling flat-sided butt (minor bruising), florally engraved trigger-guard, silver escutcheon and (later?) pommel-cap, and later iron-tipped ramrod (iron parts with scattered surface pitting, mainly on the barrel)
15½in. (39.3cm.)

Provenance

Anon. sale, Sotheby & Co., London, 16 April 1957, lot 207 (£590 to German)

Frank E. Bivens, Jr.

Clay P. Bedford (inv. no. 1016)

Literature

F. Theodore Dexter, Half Century Scrapbook of Vari-type Firearms, no. 590, plate 44

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Early Firearms of Great Britain and Ireland from the collection of Clay P. Bedford, pp. 164, 166

Exhibited

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1971, cat. no. 184

Special notice

This lot has no reserve No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

Lot Essay

The mechanism of this pistol precedes by fifty years the well-known Collier patent revolver, but is more primitive in design as it lacks a central priming magazine. Joseph Hall seems to have specialised in this type of pistol, and several have survived

See J.F. Hayward, The Art of the Gunmaker, p. 218

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