BY BOUTET & FILS, VERSAILLES, SERIAL NO. 345, CIRCA 1809

By tradition this pair of presentation pistols were said to have belonged to Napoleon and to have been captured during the retreat from Moscow in 1812. It is more probable that these fine pistols were presented by Napoleon, the presence of the insignia of the Grand Aigle of the Légion d’Honneur suggesting that the recipient was a holder of this honour. Whilst it is plausible that these pistols may have been captured from the French baggage train during the retreat from Moscow, their presence in the Imperial Russian Collection in St. Petersburg has led to speculation that they may have been presented to a Russian recipient of the Grand Aigle of the Légion d’Honneur. The Almanach Impériale of 1812 names eight prominent Russians who were bestowed with this honour by Napoleon:

S. M. L’Empereur de Toutes les Russies.
S. A. I. le Grand-Duc Constantin.
S. Ex. M. le Prince Kurakin.
S. Ex. M. le Prince Labanoff.
S. Ex. M. le Baron de Budberg.
S. Ex. M. De Romanzow.
M. le Général de Tolstoy.
S. Ex. M. De Tolstoy, Grand Maréchal.

Other pistols from the same serial number range of slightly differing form but all bearing the insignia of the Grand Aigle of the Légion d’Honneur have been noted as having Russian provenance. Unfortunately a lack of records means this only remains an interesting theory.

Nicolas-Noël Boutet

Nicolas-Noël Boutet (1761-1833) is widely acknowledged as the premier gunsmith of France during an important period of arms manufacture. The son of Noël Boutet, a French royal gunsmith, and son-in-law of Pierre Desaintes, gun maker to Louis XVI, Boutet survived the Revolution of 1789 to become an important gunsmith under the subsequent rise of Napoleon. Boutet was named Directeur Artiste of the newly formed Versailles Arms Manufactory in 1792 and in 1795 was appointed head of the newly created Arms de luxe department, responsible for richly decorated presentation arms suitable for military heroes or heads of state. Boutet remained at Versailles until 1818 when his concession was terminated. He moved to Paris but his fortunes waned and he was declared bankrupt by 1822. He died in Paris in 1833. In his heyday during Napoleon’s reign Boutet was able to marry technical perfection and precision of workmanship with the finest decoration. Skilled crafts guilds had been disbanded with the decline of Louis XVI and Boutet hired many masters of silversmithing, lock-making and goldsmithing for his Versailles workshops. Working in the Empire idiom that took hold with Napoleon’s rise and with the Mediterranean campaigns, Boutet fashioned the finest presentation arms of the period, richly embellishing them with the Graeco-Roman and Egyptian ornament that reflected the period’s ideals of military honour and glory. Fine examples of Boutet’s work are held in collections across the globe including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, The Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Wallace Collection in London and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

William Goodwin Renwick

Born to a prosperous family in Davenport, Iowa, William Goodwin Renwick (1886-1971) spent his boyhood in Claremont, California and earned an L.L.B. at Harvard in 1913. He began amassing in the decades before the Second World War one of the premier firearms collections in modern history. The 1939 Bulletin of the City Art Museum of St. Louis report on its Renwick loan exhibition, which included the present pistols, notes that “Half of them are known to have been at one time the personal property of emperors, kings, members of the European nobility, or other notable personages… objects de luxe, created for the richest and most critical personages of their time by the most skillful contemporary artists and craftsmen.” The collection was not just an assemblage of individual masterpieces, but, in its whole, told the story of firearms development from the 14th to the 20th century. Renwick bequeathed a portion of the collection to the Smithsonian, where it was exhibited in 1975. The Renwick European firearms were offered for sale in a series of ten single-owner auctions at Sotheby’s in London, held from 17 July 1972 through 17 June 1975 – landmark sales never equalled in the field of arms and armour.