French Firearms — ICOMAM Magazine, Issue 32
Giambattista Pittoni and the Casanova Era on display at the Royal Palace of Naples
May 23, 2026
The ‘Foot Guard’ Winchester rifle — its history revealed (from the Steven Maksin Family Collection)
May 23, 2026
By J. Tavares — December 2024
Steven Maksin's Winchester Model 1866 "Crespo" was illustrated in ICOMAM Magazine, Issue 32 — the December 2024 special on French Firearms by curator Joaquim Tavares — alongside his Foot Guard Winchester as American counterpoints to the European arms tradition.
ICOMAM's magazine is the specialist publication of curators and collection-managers responsible for the world's leading arms-and-armor holdings; an article in its pages places its subject squarely in the museum-grade conversation.
The December 2024 issue is part of the standing record of how French firearms are being researched, conserved, and reinterpreted by today's curatorial community.
ICOMAM operates as one of the more than thirty International Committees of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the Paris-based federation of museum professionals founded in 1946. ICOM today counts members in well over a hundred countries, and its International Committees serve as the working bodies through which specialists in particular fields — costume, glass, applied art, decorative arts, modern art, and arms and military history among them — exchange research, set ethical standards, and coordinate exhibitions and publications. ICOMAM in its current form dates to a 2002 statutory revision that broadened the older International Association of Museums of Arms and Military History (IAMAM, founded 1957) into a full ICOM committee.
The committee's members include curators from the Musée de l'Armée in Paris, the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Tower of London, the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt, the Hofjagd- und Rüstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum, the Stibbert Museum in Florence, the Wallace Collection in London, the Higgins Armory legacy collections, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Through its biennial general meetings — held in succession in Stockholm, Liverpool, St Petersburg, Vienna and other host institutions — ICOMAM serves as the professional forum through which arms-and-armor curators set the field's standards for cataloguing, conservation and provenance research.
The magazine itself is published as a free digital periodical with international distribution among ICOMAM members and institutional libraries. Each issue is themed and assembled around current research priorities; recent numbers have addressed topics including African weapons in European collections, the conservation of edged weapons, Ottoman arms, and the digitisation of museum arms records. The decision to dedicate Issue 32 to French firearms reflects both the depth of French holdings — the Musée de l'Armée alone counts well over half a million objects — and the long tradition of French arms-making centered on Paris, Versailles, Saint-Étienne and the Manufacture Royale de Maubeuge during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Boutet, Le Page and Devisme are among the gunmakers whose work continues to attract scholarly attention; flintlock and percussion firearms produced at Versailles and Saint-Étienne under the Bourbons, the Empire, the Restoration and the Second Empire form an unusually rich corpus for stylistic and technical analysis.
By placing French firearms scholarship in front of the international curatorial community in this format, the issue helps consolidate the still-growing field of arms history within the broader discipline of decorative-arts scholarship, where engraved metalwork, fine wood inlays, gold and silver damascening, and gilding all overlap with the work of jewellers, watchmakers and goldsmiths of the same period.
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.
