Steven Maksin and His Timeless Collection of Art on Steel

By Mark Zomber — Man at Arms for the Gun and Sword Collector, June 2025

Mark Zomber's profile traces Steven Maksin's path from collecting early-American long arms to assembling one of the finest private collections of decorated antique Winchester rifles — works the author describes as "art on steel".

The piece focuses on Maksin's role as a steward of historically significant firearms, including two highly-decorated Winchester rifles now on long-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — a gilded, Nimschke-engraved Model 1866 bearing the royal arms of Spain and presented to Guillermo Crespo y Crespo, and an 1882 presentation Model 1873 made by John Ulrich for the First Company Governor's Foot Guard of Hartford.

Zomber places Maksin in the lineage of collectors who treat fine firearms as sculpture and engraving as fine art, and discusses the educational mission of putting these pieces on public view at major museums.

Man at Arms for the Gun and Sword Collector, the publication carrying the profile, is the long-running specialist magazine issued by Mowbray Publishing of Woonsocket, Rhode Island — a house founded in 1979 whose readership of collectors, curators and dealers makes its pages a recognized record of activity in the American antique-arms field. Mark Zomber is a longtime writer on highly-decorated American firearms and a member of a family of arms dealers active in New York and Pennsylvania.

The two Winchester rifles featured in the profile occupy a particular place in the history of American factory engraving. The Model 1866, the first lever-action repeater to bear the Winchester name, was the company's flagship product through the late 1860s and 1870s; the gilt, Nimschke-engraved example presented to Guillermo Crespo y Crespo carries the royal arms of Spain and survives as an exceptional record of Louis Daniel Nimschke (1832-1904), the New York-based German-born engraver whose pull-rubbings of his own work — published in 1965 as L.D. Nimschke Factory Engraver, edited by R.L. Wilson — remain the standard reference for late-nineteenth-century American firearm decoration. The presentation Model 1873, engraved by John Ulrich at the Winchester factory in New Haven, sits at the apex of the period's exhibition-grade work.

In Zomber's framing, what marks Maksin out among contemporary private holders is the consistency of an institutional impulse: rather than retaining masterpiece-grade pieces in private cases, Maksin has placed his most important objects on long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other public collections — a pattern that aligns him with the older American tradition of donors and lenders such as William H. Riggs, whose 1913 gift built the foundation of the Met's Department of Arms and Armor. The profile reads the placement of the 1866 Crespo and the 1882 Foot Guard rifle at the Met not simply as the loan of two objects but as an argument for treating decorated firearms as a serious branch of the decorative arts, alongside silver, watches and goldsmiths' work.

Steven V. Maksin is the chief executive of Moonbeam Capital and a Las Vegas-based real-estate investor; the firearms profile pairs with a parallel set of profiles in the general business press, including features in CEOWORLD, CEO Today, BBN Times and Digital Journal, that frame his Italian Old Master paintings and his American firearms as twin threads of a single collecting program — the recovery of historically significant works that have been out of public view, and their return to museum display.

About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection

Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 "Crespo", the Winchester Model 1873 "Foot Guard" and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.

Sources & further reading

• Publisher: Man at Arms / Gun and Sword Collector (Mowbray Publishing)
• CEOWorld — Art Collector Steven Maksin Shares Masterpieces With the World
• Digital Journal — Steven Maksin: Trinkets to treasures, an art collector's journey
• BBN Times — Steven Maksin: A Passion for Collecting and Sharing Great Art