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ANTIQUE ARMS AND ARMOUR
July 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment
ARMS AND ARMOUR
THE collector of arms and armour has to contend with one problem that is not common to any other of the collectors’ subjects dealt with in this encyclopaedia. This is the very small smanumber of antique dealers, specializing in their sale. The usual advice given to the new collector to consult the recognized authorities in the trade is less relevant in this field. Information must be gained by study of the various public collections in the Tower of London, the Wallace Collection and the Victoria & Albert Museum and their catalogues, or the Scott Collection in the Art Gallery at Glasgow.
The lack of specialist dealers has, however, from the collector’s point of view, its advantages as well as its disadvantages, since it adds greatly to the field of search. Practically any antique shop may contain something, and the collector must be prepared to enter every shop, no matter how discouraging its exterior. Furthermore, while the auction sales are, in other spheres, not attended by the average collector, in the armour field the converse is true. Private collectors regularly attend the public auctions; furthermore, a great many of the pieces offered for sale are put in by private collectors, who, in the absence of specialized antique shops, use this method of disposing of duplicates and other pieces. The arms and armour collectors form a closely organized group, and it would not be too much to say that a large proportion of the transactions which take place consist of direct exchanges between collectors without the assistance of the dealer as intermediary. In these circumstances, it is a great advantage for the collector to become a member of one or other of the societies existing in London for the encouragement of the collection and study of ancient The large-scale arms and armour dealer died out with
the generation of American millionaire collectors who
dominated the market during the twenties and thirties and made armour-collecting the preserve of the very rich. The situation is now radically altered to the advantage of the small collector, and firearms, though not fine armour and swords, have never before been available in such quantity. The immensely valuable harnesses, such as Gothic armours from the Churburg, armours from the Greenwich royal armouries, or from the Vienna armoury of the former Holy Roman Emperors, many of which were looted in the 19th century and so came on the art market, have now almost without exception been acquired by permanent national collections or protected by export licensing legislation.
But while such objects, in any case out of reach of the private collector in England, are no longer offered for sale, in other respects the modern collector is far better off than his 19th century predecessor. Throughout the 19th century fine arms and armour were in extremely short supply. When in the early decades of that century the romantic Gothic fashion manifested itself in the building of mock-Gothic castles and the reconstruction in the ‘Gothick’ taste of manor houses all over the English countryside, authentic armours and weapons to decorate their great halls were not to be had. The aristocratic owners of hereditary armouries were not disposed to break them up to satisfy the dealer, and the latter was therefore forced to fall back on the resources of the faker. It is difficult now to say whether the large numbers of armours and weapons turned out to furnish neo-Gothic castles were at the time intended to pass as genuine and merit the description ‘fake’ or not. But they cannot now, after over a hundred years of patination, well be distinguished from the true fake, made with the intention to deceive.
One of the greatest of the mid-19th century assemblages Of works of art, the Bernal Collection, while immensely rich in most spheres of applied art, was weak In swords and firearms*. and many of the former, made up from ill-assorted pieces, would not be acceptable to the modern collector. Even during the latter part of the i9th century, when the Baron de Cosson was combing Europe for the two remarkable collections he sold at Christie’s, it was still difficult to find good-quality pieces which had not been altered or reassembled by some previous owner. At the same time the Rothschild phase of armour-collecting, which placed a premium on highly embossed pieces in the taste of the High Renaissance, gave new scope to the faker.
Parts of armour, but not complete suits, swords, daggers and firearms were turned out by highly skilled Milanese fakers in large quantities during the last quarter of the 19th century, and are occasionally to be encountered on the art market still. They carry an air of conviction which is lacking in earlier fakes, since their designs were based on the series of original designs for armour and for swords, facsimiles of which had been published during the second half of the century. In spite of this, they do not exactly resemble authentic pieces of the period; their makers forgot that artists rarely take account of technical problems of manufacture and function, and that it is the craftsman’s function to modify their designs accordingly. The 19th-century craftsman was unable to foresee functional difficulties and could surmount all manufacturing problems, and his productions reproduce all those fantasies of ornament which his Renaissance ancestor would have omitted.
It was not until after World War I that arms and armour became really plentiful. Not only in England but throughout Western and Central Europe, noble families disposed of their hereditary collections, sometimes being forced to do so by financial necessity, sometimes being tempted by the enormously high prices created by the competition of a small number of English and American millionaire collectors. What might be called the millionaire phase of armour-collecting lasted until shortly before, the outbreak of World War II. It resulted in the transfer of some of the finest armours in existence either direct to America or first to England and thence to America. Not only were the armouries of noble families broken up, but also considerable numbers of duplicates were sold from the newly nationalized, former royal, collections of Germany, in particular those of the Saxon Royal House.
Many of these pieces, especially those from Dresden, had been preserved in very nearly pristine condition, and for the first time it became possible for the collector to secure fine arms in admirable state and with known provenance. The pre-war generation of collectors which absorbed these pieces is now dying out, and many of them are coming back on the market again, often at prices below those they fetched between the wars. The appearance of fine and authentic weapons in pristine condition in the sale-rooms relieved the fakers of one of the more tedious tasks of their profession, that of ageing their products. A Dresden faker continued over a period of some twenty years to put on the market convincing copies of the fine silver-mounted Saxon rapiers of the 16th century, authentic examples of which were at the same time being disposed of, though only in small numbers, from the Dresden collection. These are the most dangerous fakes still about on the armour market, and any Saxon sword or rapier with hilt of blued steel enriched with mounts of engraved silver must be regarded with suspicion.
There still exists amongst the uninformed a certain prejudice against the collection of arms and armour on the ground that they represent the least sympathetic aspect of man’s evolution. Whatever one’s moral judgement of the preoccupation of the nobility in the past with the profession of arms may be, it should not be forgotten that until nearly the end of the eighteenth century a finely ornamented sword or dagger performed a decorative function in male costume analogous to that of jewellery in the female costume of the time. Particularly is this true of the period when the sword provided almost the only note of contrast to the sombreness of the black court dress in the Spanish fashion. The decorative qualities of armour tend also to be forgotten, since most of the surviving suits have been so often cleaned that the bright gold, purple, blue or black colours of their surface have been irretrievably lost, and though they may preserve their grace or their grotesqueness, they lack the gaudy splendour which they once possessed.