Displaying items by tag: arms

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has published a new handbook—the first in more than 20 years—of its encyclopedic collections. Featuring some 550 masterpieces from the Museum’s world renowned holdings of Asian, European, American, and modern and contemporary art, this volume includes a broad range of media from each of the Museum’s curatorial departments, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, the decorative arts, costumes and textiles, arms and armor, and architectural settings. Expanded entries provide in depth information on some of the most significant works, among them Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and a superb man and horse armor acquired in 2009.

The introduction to the handbook, written by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, recounts the Museum’s institutional history and the formation and distinctive characteristics of its collection.

The Royal Armouries branch at the Frazier History Museum, in Louisville, Kentucky, which opened in 2004, has failed to raise any money from US donors, we can reveal. Ten years ago, Britain’s national museum of arms and armour loaned 250 objects to the new US museum. Edward Impey, the director-general of the Armouries, says that as far he knows, the Frazier loans “did not raise a penny”. The objects will return to the UK when the partnership ends, by mutual consent, in January 2015.

Until recently, the Armouries’ website described the Frazier as one of its four “branches”, along with the Tower of London, its main museum in Leeds, Yorkshire, and Fort Nelson in Portsmouth, in the south of England.

Bonhams is set to auction a rare pair of Brescian flintlock holster pistols, circa 1660–70, on November 26. The pistols, which will be sold in the antique arms and armor sale in Knightsbridge, London, are estimated to sell for £60,000–80,000 ($97,000–130,000).

Pietro Manani, who is listed by Brescian firearms expert Nolfo di Carpegna as “one of the most active craftsmen of his time," made the pistols. The length of his working life is unknown, and some speculate that the thirty-eight known examples of Manani's work may be the work of a father-son duo.

The antiques dealer and collector Joseph Kindig Jr. never fired a shot with any of his hundreds of American rifles made around 1800. He was not a hunter; he was a vegetarian who did not like to kill anything. At his store in York, Pa., he would refuse to sell his gun inventory to buyers who seemed snobbish or ignorant. He believed that the firearms represented the first major American artistic innovation.

His guns came mainly from Pennsylvania workshops, where a single artisan made and assembled each one: the maple stocks, iron mechanisms and brass floral ornaments. Each workman’s product “contained something of his spirit and soul,” Mr. Kindig told an interviewer in the 1950s.