Rare arquebuse de chasse à rouet, plaquée... - Lot 147 - Pierre Bergé & Associés

Rare arquebuse de chasse à rouet, plaquée de corne de cerf brute et ornée d'un large ovale émaillé, probablement Augsbourg vers 1660. A rare German wheel-lock sporting rifle, probably Augsburg, circa 1660. With swamped octagonal sighted barrel struck with a mark on the underside, P, rifled with seven grooves, the backsight fitted with folding leaf, the lock with internal wheel and finely engraved with a boar-hunting vignette including a mounted sportsman in contemporary dress, the dog and the dog-spring bridle each engraved with marine monsters and fitted with sliding pan-cover, with wooden full stock veneered with panels of natural staghorn over almost its entire surface, and the cheekpiece inset with a rose enamel concave copper plaque finely drawn with the figure of Diana the Huntress recumbent with her hunting dogs and set within a raised gilt-brass frame, the patch-box cavity stamped with the initials EB, the fore-end inscribed with pencilled initials on the inside, the ramrod-pipes, the but-plate, the patchbox cover and the fore-end cap all veneered in staghorn en suite with the stock, with iron trigger-guard, set trigger, and horn-tipped wooden ramrod. L.: 105.4 cm - L. barrel: 78.3 cm. Provenance: Almost certainly from the gunroom of the Grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, at Schloss Ettersburg. The presence of the pencilled initials of a late 19th or early 20th century conservator on the inside of the fore-end is characteristic for firearms from Schloss Ettersburg, as perhaps are the stamped letters EB within the patch-box cavity. A number of private sales of firearms from the Ettersburg gunroom began in the late 19th century and continued in the period following the First World War. The 1927 Fischer/ Kahlert auction of firearms from the collection includes a rifle also stocked in natural staghorn and the cheekpiece inset with an enamelled oval plaque, lot 73, illustrated (the subject is Venus and Cupid, mistakenly given as Mars). Galerie Fischer, Waffensaal des Sch