Features

On the day that the Bastille was stormed Louis XVI famously recorded “rien” (nothing) in his game book.

Signed in gold to the 10in (25cm) damascus barrels Manton London, the best-known name among London gunsmiths, a cased pair of 25-bore flintlock duelling pistols led the specialist arms and armour sale held by Antony Cribb (22% buyer’s premium) at Abingdon on July 24.

It has not been a vintage season for armour in the saleroom, but some of the recent highlights from London and Munich are shown here.

A famous royal regiment was remembered at the Peter Francis (20% buyer’s premium) auction in Carmarthen.

It took a bid of €60,000 (£53,100) to secure a pair of flintlock pistols of c.1730 from the armoury of the Princes of Lobkowitz at Hermann Historica (25% buyer’s premium) in Munich in May.

The classic English sporting gun is a sidelock, but for many the ‘round-action’ shotguns perfected by John Dickson of Edinburgh in the 1870s are the most elegant of all.

Edged weapons from the East dominated the summer sale at Thomas Del Mar (24% buyer’s premium) in London on June 27 and it was an old collection of Indian dress daggers that produced the highest prices.

A rare and early combination of a war hammer and pistol was a highlight of the Bonhams (25/12.5% buyer’s premium) sale in Knightsbridge on May 23, selling for £24,000.

The top lot at Bonhams (25/12.5% buyer’s premium) in San Francisco on June 19 was an exceptional cased example of a specially engraved Colt 1851 percussion revolver with shoulder stock.

Among the thousands of lots in Hermann Historica’s (25% buyer’s premium) May sales series in Munich, one of the highlights was this gold inlaid karud from Turkestan which sold at €29,000 (£25,665).

Not every Victorian silver tea and coffee service was sold for scrap in the great meltdown of 2011– when at one point the price reached almost £30 per oz.

While good-quality but familiar Georgian silver such as entrée dishes, tureens and sauceboats estimated in the £6000-12,000 range met stiff resistance at Dorchester auction house Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) on June 28, two top-quality pieces made their money.

These outsize tongs, below, proved the major surprise at Adam’s (20% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on June 17.

As collecting evolves, many pieces of decorative, and historically captivating, Georgian silver are priced very keenly at both auction and retail.

The recent death of designer Stuart Devlin and the book he published just a few months before could lead to a reappraisal of his work.

The so-called auricular style – all organic fluid lines and asymmetrical shapes populated by marine invertebrates and reptiles – can first be found in the 1598 ornament book of Northern Mannerism, Architectura…, by Wendel Dietterlin of Stuttgart.

Pairs of Georgian candlesticks by the best-known London specialist makers such as William Cafe and Ebenezer Coker continue to sell well enough, as long as condition is acceptable.

This novelty silver scent bottle, below, appealing to two niche sections largely immune to the swings of the larger silver market, was a target for collectors when offered at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

Considering that Norwich was, after London, the largest and wealthiest city in England from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, its assay office (1562-1705) was comparatively shortlived. As such, secular silver produced in the city rarely appears on the market.

Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) is currently selling across a number of auctions a cache of items from the family of HG Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.