A pair of percussion pistols of Prince Albert by Koenig & Sons. Muzzle loading rifled barrels with platinum vents, decorated in the gothic style with heat blueing & gold inlay. Striped elm stocks heavily inlaid with decorative foliate sliver inlay including a dragon.

Prince Albert and his brother Ernest were accomplished shots from an early age, participating in the allied local traditions of game shooting (in Coburg principally hare, pheasant and deer) and target shooting or marksmanship with rifles. Following his arrival in England, Prince Albert tended to favour the best English makers, chiefly Charles Lancaster, for his working guns, many of which he received as birthday or Christmas gifts from the Queen and which remain in the Royal Collection at Windsor.

The tradition of gunmaking in Coburg is closely linked to the history of the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg. In earlier times this meant the provision of military weapons, and the armoury of the Veste Coburg remains among the largest in Germany. In the modern period the emphasis was on sporting and presentation weapons. Guns in the latter category tended not to be used in the field, and therefore allowed the maker to deploy the costliest materials and most ambitious ornamentation.

Thus when Prince Albert wrote in 1846 to thank King Frederick William IV for the gift of a pair of pistols, he judged that they were ‘almost too beautiful to be allowed to bear witness to my skill in target practice’.

Caspar Georg Koenig (1793-1857) and his two sons, Julius (c.1822-55) and Gustav (c.1826-60), served Prince Albert's father Ernest I and his son and successor, Prince Albert's brother Ernest II (1818-93), as court rifle makers (hofbüchsenmacher). The decoration of the network of knotted foliate twigs inlaid in engraved silver on the highly figured stocks of the pistols, and the slender Gothic tracery overlaid in gold on the blued steel barrels, are very close in spirit to the Gothic ‘dialect’ employed in the remodelling of the Coburg palaces, the Ehrenburg and the Rosenau, by the architect André-Marie Renié-Grétry, based in turn on the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841).

Signed on barrels in gold in Gothic script: C.G. Koenig & Soehne herzogl: hofbüchsenmacher in Coburg; signed on lock: C.G. Koenig & Soehne; numbered 1 and 2 on top of barrels

Text adapted from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London, 2010