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A Highly Unusual 12-Bore Silver-Mounted Flintlock Sporting Gun image 1
A Highly Unusual 12-Bore Silver-Mounted Flintlock Sporting Gun image 2
Lot 335

A Highly Unusual 12-Bore Silver-Mounted Flintlock Sporting Gun
By Edward Newton, Grantham, London Silver Hallmarks For 1743

29 April 2010, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £6,000 inc. premium

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A Highly Unusual 12-Bore Silver-Mounted Flintlock Sporting Gun
By Edward Newton, Grantham, London Silver Hallmarks For 1743

With swamped rebrowned three-stage barrel with silver satyr-mask fore-sight, the breech section octagonal changing to polygonal, the octagonal part engraved with flower-heads, signed 'E. Newton Grantham' within an engraved shaped rectangular panel and struck with Newton's own barrel marks, gold-lined touch-hole, shaped foliate engraved grooved tang, rounded lock with raised border signed on a baldachin surmounted by a scallop-shell, large engraved safety-catch, pan with water-drains and raised lip, and cock with foliate details chiselled in relief (top jaw and screw associated), figured walnut full stock carved in relief with two overlapping shells behind the barrel tang, engraved cast and chased silver mounts of fine quality, the tang of the butt-plate with a rocaille and a bunch of flowers in relief, the trigger-guard engraved with scallop shells, flowers and foliage and terminating in a foliate spray at the front and a rose at the rear, the side-plate in the form of a pike, and the escutcheon in the form of a cock pheasant perched up a tree, three silver baluster ramrod-pipes (the front one replaced), and horn-tipped ramrod (some wear throughout), silver maker's mark JA, probably of Jeconiah Ashley
107 cm. barrel

Footnotes

Provenance:
Alexander Montgomerie, 10th Earl of Eglinton (1723-1769), Eglinton Castle, Irvine, Ayrshire
Eglinton Castle sale, Dowell's of Edinburgh, 1-5 December 1925, lot 903
W. Keith Neal Collection (G331) sold in these Rooms 10 November, 2005, lot 19

Literature:
W. Keith Neal & D.H.L. Back, Great British Gunmakers 1740-1790, 1975, p. 108, plates 378-380
Idem, Messrs Griffin & Tow and W. Bailes, 1989, p. 18
Fred Buller, The Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike, 1979, p. 181 (side-plate illustrated). A large pike of 42½ lb. and measuring 47½ in. long (illustrated on p. 180) is believed to have been shot in Dene Park lake by an estate keeper and might have been the model for the side-plate on the present gun

The 10th Earl of Eglinton, friend and benefactor of James Boswell, the biographer, was murdered by Mungo Campbell, whom he found trespassing on his land. Campbell was convicted of murder but cheated the hangman by committing suicide in Edinburgh Castle

The design of the side-plate of this gun appears to be unique

For Newton's barrel marks, found on a gun made by him for Evelyn Pierrepont (1711-1773), 2nd Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull (sold from the W. Keith Neal Collection at Christie's, King Street, 25 October 2001, lot 57), see Neal & Back, Great British Gunmakers 1740-1790, plate 228

For information on Newton (1692?-1764), who appears to have trained both Robert Wogdon and John Twigg, see Tom Wimsey, 'Newton of Grantham', J.A.A.S., vol. XVI, no. 5 (September 2000), pp. 281-289

Additional information

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