Wheellock Rifle with Spanner, Shot Extracting Tool, and Shooting Patch

In very good condition and retaining its companion spanner and original ramrod with detachable barrel-shot extracting tool, this fine wheellock rifle is a rare example of a distinctive class of luxury seventeenth-century sporting firearms that chiefly stood out for the striking adornment of their stocks with unconventional––and sometimes eclectically combined––materials and decorative techniques. The metal components are gilded and predominantly plain, allowing the roughness of the stock’s natural staghorn veneer, and the colorfulness of the finely painted enameled oval plaque on the cheek to become more evident. While occasionally used to veneer the stocks of firearms as early as the mid-sixteenth century, natural staghorn veneer only took on a much more exotic character a century later, once a handful of gunmakers began to use it in conjunction with other unconventional or precious materials including painted enameled copper plaques, cowhorn, tortoise shell, turquoises, silver, and gold. As such, it is a potent manifestation of the baroque predilection for the unusual and eccentric, applied to the gunmaker’s art.

The barrel bears the mark of the noted Augsburg gunmaker Martin Kammerer, one of the chief proponents of such unconventional luxury firearms. Kammerer is the author of at least seven wheellock sporting rifles with stocks veneered in translucent tortoise shell, which are now in the Livrustkammern, Stockholm (inv. 10872); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (acc. 1977-167-809 and 1977-167-810. Bequest of Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch, 1977); the Tøjhusmuseet, Copenhagen (inv. B. 558); the Státní Hrad Bítov (inv. unknown); the Wittelsbach Stiftung, Munich (inv. unknown); and an American private collection.

Stylistically, however, this rifle belongs to a much smaller, even more distinctive group, as only four other rifles veneered in natural staghorn by Kammerer are known. One, with a silvered barrel that bears the date of 1667, a silvered lock, and silver mounts (including an oval plaque on the cheek), is preserved in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Gewehrkammer, inv. G 171); another, with a blued barrel, partly gilded lock, gilded mounts, and a similar rose pink-enameled oval plaque on the cheek, which came by way of inheritance from the gunroom of the dukes of Saxe-Weissenfels to the main line of the Wettin in 1746, is in the same collection (Gewehrkammer, inv. G 172); the remaining two examples, each of which has an oval plaque of tortoise shell on the cheek, are preserved in the Tøjhusmuseet, Copenhagen (inv. B. 559, B. 560).

The enameled plaque adorning the cheek compares closely in conception and execution with the similarly-shaped plaques on the previously mentioned rifle by Kammerer in Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Gewehrkammer, inv. G 172); a rifle by the Augsburg gunmaker Melchior Wetschgin, which is dated 1669 on the barrel and part of a hunting garniture in the same collection (Gewehrkammer, inv. G 354); and an unsigned rifle with a staghorn-veneered stock that formerly was in a German private collection. In light of the available evidence, it thus seems likely that they were all created in Augsburg. The artist who painted them has not been identified.