EARLY FIREARMS

Taranaki Daily News, 26 August 1931, Page 3

EARLY FIREARMS

GAILY CARVED STOCKS. A REMARKABLE EXAMPLE! The lavishness with which manj ancient firearms were, adorned is shown by a recent acquisition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is a gun with a stock carved by the German artist Johann Michael Maucher, who flourished at the end of the seventeenth century. In Maucher’s timer patrons of the arts were also frequently lovers of the chase, and artist# were therefore likely to take special care in making their patrons’ guns. Two men worked on this particular gun, Maucher on the stock and I. C. Schefl, of Graz, about w’hom little is known, on the barrel.

The stock is of walnut, inset with a series of ivory plaques, a recent museum bulletin explains. On it Maucher carved a number of spirited hunting scenes, and one showing the birth of Venus—apparently a favourite subject' with him, for it appears pn four other guns in foreign collections. Next to the lock a stag and a wild ass are shown, each with a grotesque bird’s head in front of it. On the butt are pictured a boar hunt, a lion and his mate, a wolf attacking a hare, a hunter seated on a dead boar and blowing his horn, stags, hounds ■ pursuing hares and foxes, etc. Those parts which are not thus adorned are decorated with rich foliation.

The lock of the gun is severely plain, and according to the museum’s bulletin does not belong to the gun. The original lock vras probably as richly ornamented as the stock, to judge • from other Maucher guns; no doubt it was removed by some collector and replaced with the one now in it.

“There is a ,-tory of a Russian grand duke, a personage at Biarritz in France,” says Stephen V. Grancsay in the museum bulletin, “who, after purchasing a o-un- or pistol, would take out a serew-driv4f,i remove the which he pocketed, and walk out leaving tho luckless wun or nistol behind!”