“Everyone looks at arms and armour as being this incredibly niche area to collect. It’s not at all,” says Redmond Finer. “You’ve got bronze, steel, wood, gemmology, diamonds, rubies. You’ve got everything.” Finer manages the Peter Finer Gallery, the shop his father founded in London in 1967, trading in works ranging from edged weapons to coats of arms and cannons. He is one of several specialist dealers offering arms and armour at this year’s Tefaf art and antiques fair in Maastricht.
Today, there is a dearth of great objects available to collectors, Finer notes, as institutions have taken many of the best pieces out of circulation. He concentrates on the masterpiece market: at Tefaf, he will be presenting, among other works, a 15th-century Italian Renaissance sword — inlaid with silver, gold, ebony and bone — and a dandyish 16th-century Comb Morion helmet of the royal guard serving the Prince-Electors of Saxony.
Inside Peter Finer Gallery: ‘These works were made by people who understood the functionality of the object, but they were also artists’
Redmond Finer: ‘If you can go off and buy it somewhere else, we’re not doing our job correctly’ © Tori Ferenc
“If you can go off and buy it somewhere else, we’re not doing our job correctly,” says Finer of his stock. The works in his gallery, he says, “were made by people who understood the functionality of the object, but they were also artists. It’s the idea that you have the background of engineering coupled with essentially contemporary art. If a gun was made in the rococo period, the carving on it will be rococo.”
