Gun

The antiques industry is being called on to take part in a consultation to reform the law governing the sale and ownership of antique firearms.

This exceptional Spanish flintlock sporting gun is dated 1739, but both the gun and case bear the arms of Pope Pius VII, whose papacy was dominated by the Vatican’s troubled relationship with France during the Napoleonic period nearly a century later.

Fine and unusual English guns made for Indian princes formed the most lucrative sub-section of Holt’s latest London sale.

To most people air guns are the low-powered toys that little boys play about with in the back garden, but the air rifle has a surprisingly long history and at one time they were among the most feared weapons on the battlefield.

WHEN John Harrison set about solving the problem of how to measure longitude, the name Association would have held a special resonance for him.

On September 10, Litts, the UK’s largest retailer of sporting guns, is holding its inaugural auction of stock.

WHEN it comes to the traditional English country house nothing is more redolent of the look of the Victorian and Edwardian periods than the old tack and gun rooms of the country lodge, replete with saddles, whips, boots and mounted trophies such as perch and stag.

Ever keen to come up with new auction formats that stimulate the interest of private buyers, Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) held their first sale of sporting and ornithological pictures combined with sporting guns at Knightsbridge on August 7-8.

PROOF that the specialist collector knows no close season was offered in June by Weller & Dufty (15% buyer’s premium), at Birmingham and Wallis & Wallis (15% buyer’s premium), Lewes, who held sales devoted to arms and armour and militaria on consecutive days.

UK: BOXLOCK shotguns are the most common of British fowling firearms and those with bolt-actions are certainly not unusual, but this particular model, left, aroused great interest at Weller and Dufty’s (15 per cent premium) arms and armour auction in Birmingham on March 14.

UK: IN THE days when thousands of game birds would be shot in a morning on the moors by the likes of Walsingham and Ripon, it might have come as a shock to learn that no records of this gun ever making a successful kill existed, even more so when the target was many thousand times the size of your average pheasant.