▲ SHOT THROUGH THE ART,
A best gun is undoubtedly characterised by the finest manufacture; today, it is often defined by the fine art that adorns it, too
With more metal and less wood at the breechend, engravers had space to expand their designs
In his manifesto for the Arts & Crafts movement, founder William Morris wrote: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” The best London gun fulfils these criteria perfectly: it is of absolute utility and a personal delight to its owner. Morris was writing in 1882, in his collection of essays Hopes and Fears for Art, at the height of the Victorian era. The Victorians believed every object, no matter how utilitarian, could be turned into a thing of beauty, from a sewage pumping station to a railway arch. It was in this mood of artistic optimism that the hand engraving of bespoke shotguns from the great makers, including Purdey and Holland & Holland, began to reach the heights.
Elaborate engraving of metal and steel weapons is a human instinct. Gun engraver Vince Crowley is quoted by The Hand Engravers Association: “The engraving of steel is a centuries-old practice, which has essentially been used to embellish weapons.” In the Bronze Age, blades and armour were engraved; by the 15th century, engraving found its way onto firearms.
Yet four centuries later, Purdey’s earliest surviving firearm, dating back to 1815, has little ornamentation. It is engraved with the Purdey name in Gothic script, the original Princes Street address and a few discreet scroll and leaf emblems. Utility came first with shotguns. As Crowley pointed out, “Engraving in steel in the main absorbs light,” and the scattering of engravings prevented glare and shine reflecting off the lockplate and distracting the eye. The possibility of beauty soon followed: “Fine engraved lines look dark, in the spectrum of grey to black. This enables an engraver to create pencil-like lines or dots that can produce almost photographic images in this medium.”
Jonathan Irby, of James Purdey & Sons, is in the ideal position to chart this transition from utility to beauty. “Gun engraving as an art form developed as the space for it grew over the course of the 19th century, although the skills and techniques had been developed much earlier,” he explains. “One dramatic example would be the percussion gun in the Royal Collection at Sandringham with animals carved in the round forming every part of the metalwork. With more metal and less wood at the breech-end, engravers had the space to expand their designs to those we know today.”
Even in 1869, a Purdey gun (No 7902) had gamescene engraving, including dogs running after a pheasant, which was unusual then but would be typical of many modern gun engravings. The tradition of fantastical and elaborate pictorial engraving was evident almost from the beginning, with some of Purdey’s earliest guns and rifles featuring sea serpents and stags. So Perazzi’s top model, the Extra Super grade, is simply following centuries-old tradition with its lockplates featuring naked ladies with abundant flowing hair and ample breasts. Fabrizio Forti, sales manager at Perazzi, believes that glamorous engraving is an important part of the luxury gun’s appeal. “Our Extra Super is the most expensive that we produce. The engraving is designed and selected historically by the Perazzi family. Our leading engravers, including Giuseppe Zacchi, do all the work by hand. We engrave the whole gun, including the receiver and the trigger guard and the various steel work.”
Forti goes on to make the distinction between what clients want in Britain and Europe: “I think many of our designs are Italian in feel. In England, you have a different culture in engraving but at the same time we like to have work that is very much in keeping with the more traditional styles of English guns. Our guns are highly prized in the UK for their quality of workmanship overall, including the engraving – and, of course, they are favoured by competition shooters for their performance. We aim to combine that modern performance with the traditional way of producing guns.”
Irby agrees that client demand had an influence in the development of different engraving styles. At Purdey, he says: “Men like James Lucas and Walter Warren were first-rate engravers, but working in a period where the majority of clients were more interested in the perfection of fit and balance than necessarily the finer aesthetics. That is not to say there weren’t flourishes – for example, embellishments on the fences do appear relatively frequently.”
During the late 19th century, James Lucas was Purdey’s head engraver and highly respected, earning one of the highest salaries in the London gunmaking trade. From 1855 right up to the early 20th century, it was Lucas, working with another Purdey engraver, J Mace Snr, who developed the fine, tight scrollwork that formed the rose-and-scroll pattern so prized in Purdey guns today. Yet even at the same time as Lucas was developing the intricate but discreet scrollwork that is the universally recognisable attribute of a best London gun, other influences were coming from even farther afield than Europe.
Gavin Gardiner, gun auctioneer and Sotheby’s consultant, sums it up in one word: “America.” As a nation stereotypically obsessed with guns, it is no surprise that the United States had a thriving gun-manufacturing industry during the 19th century in parallel to Britain. Its foremost engraver was LD (Louis Daniel) Nimschke,
Perazzi shotguns displaying elaborate game scenes using gold inlay; the firm believes that glamorous engraving is an important part of a luxury gun’s appeal
who worked for the leading US gunmakers of the day, including Colt, Winchester, Remington, Sharps, Smith & Wesson and Henry. Nimschke engraved firearms for President Teddy Roosevelt, General Custer and Buffalo Bill. He often used bass-relief and gilding in what is now known as the New York Style, very different from the best London school.
Gardiner explains: “The American influence has played an important part in the post-war rise of the ‘high art’ gun. The English taste in guns was for the workmanship and elite status of the gun to speak for itself. A gentleman shooting with a best London gun didn’t have to show off about it. Americans had no such restraints. Immediately after World War II, English gunmakers needed to expand their markets as there was so little spending power at home. So they catered for American collector clients who loved elaborate scenes, including gold damascening – the master of this was Ken Hunt, who has been referred to as the godfather of gun engraving and who retired in 2011. Another source of demand for ‘art’ engraving even before this was the Indian Maharajas, who ordered their rifles and guns engraved with grand Indian hunting scenes.”
Irby points out that much of this work isn’t, strictly speaking, engraving. “What we now call ‘carving’, otherwise called chasing or champlevé, has its own history back to the 18th century. Then as now, these guns were both firearms and art pieces, combining the best gun making with the highest form of artistry. In Purdey terms, there are gold-inlaid guns recorded as early as the mid-1860s, and one only has to mention Aristide Barré to a collector to understand that the exhibition-level engraved Purdey guns have a history stretching back to at least the 1880s, if not before.”
Barré was from Paris; another continental engraver, now working at John Rigby and Co, is Geoffrey Lignon, who is specialising in gilded African wildlife scenes on the newly resurrected Rising Bite model and other guns. Lignon came to Rigby straight from training in engraving at the Liege School of Gunmaking. The young engraver says: “To engrave upon rifles of this quality is extremely satisfying, and it is wonderful having the opportunity to engrave exotic animals on them.”
Far from being a dying art, gun engraving – in both the best London and New York styles – is thriving. The Hand Engravers Association was founded as recently as 2007 and has already made strong links with the London gun trade. The Association represents all engravers, not solely those working on guns, and they are very much aware what a strong element gun engraving is in the overall art. Association spokesman Sally
Dodson says: “Gun engraving can be seen as a niche craft but it is a skill that is very much in demand today. British gun engravers have a great reputation and the leaders in the field often have waiting lists of two or three years for their work.” The gun trade has been quick to make links with the Hand Engravers Association, with Holland & Holland sponsoring apprentices, including some of the new wave of female engravers like Lucy Moseley.
While many of the great engravers of the past were apprenticed and then taken onto the bench of a single maker, today’s engravers are increasingly choosing to be freelance. One of the reasons for this is the arrival of the laser cutter. For obvious reasons, machine engraving is faster and cheaper than hand engraving. The cutting tool can be pre-programmed to reproduce a particular design repeatedly in fairly short time. Then, with just a few taps on the keyboard, the design can be customised to a particular client’s requirements.
Since the ethos of a best London gun is the opposite of mechanisation, the laser could be seen as a threat to engraving. However, the greater accessibility of engraving has resurrected interest in the art and freelance engravers are incorporating elements of both in their work. Freelance engraver Andy Miles is optimistic: “I think engraving has improved a lot over the years and is now more accessible to big and small gunmakers through individual engravers, so the ideas and wishes of their clients are being met through consultation whilst ordering. That means that in a way it’s the clients moving it forward but, at the same time, the leading gunmakers are still keeping going the traditional house styles of the past 150 years.”
Among the new styles emerging is Celtic knotwork, a speciality of South Wales-based engraver Paul Burton Dyer. “I started to engrave gun parts and restore firearms largely for American customers,” he says. “This has developed into engraving not just guns but jewellery, guitars, belt buckles, knives. I can work with a client to produce a particular design but, at present, I am interested in Celtic, Saxon and Medieval influences.” Engraving on existing guns may need revisiting, he reminds. “Often the engraving on triggerguards and barrels wears away and requires re-cutting. This is usually neglected while woodwork and other restoration has been completed.”
The idea of the engraver working on an existing, perhaps antique, gun is intriguing as a link between tradition and innovation. Those lucky enough to own guns with bare lockplates have an amazing opportunity to add custom-designed engraving, and so create something to please William Morris.
Gun engraving can be seen as a niche craft but it is much in demand