of rectangular form, with wooden core and a tapering central gutter rising to a forward-curved beak at the top, the inner surface faced with natural boar skin, fitted with a horizontal iron bar at the top, three rectangular iron staples and nails for attaching enarmes, the outer face applied with gessoed canvas painted with polychrome decorated with the Austrian Bindenschild superimposed with scrolling foliage, and the upper portion with a shield charged with a six-point mullet on a black ground on the left and the cross of the League of St George on the right (the paint with small losses and crackling, very small areas of light worm damage, an early repair on the left, some early repainting), 117.0 cm high

Provenance

The Town Arsenal, Klausen, Tyrol

Charles Somers Somers-Cocks, 3rd Earl Somers (1819-83), Eastnor Castle, thence by descent

Exhibited

Commemorative Exhibition of the Art Treasures of the Midlands, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 1934, cat. no. 90

Literature

Lady Henry Somerset, Eastnor Castle, London 1889, p. 22: ‘The Archers Shield should be particularly noticed; a pole passed through the rings was fixed in the ground, and the archer shot from behind the shield….[dates] from the Wars of the Roses, and the heraldic bearings of [the owner is] painted on’

During the spring of 1871, fifty-two large and seven smaller pavises were reported, along with around six hundred arrows, in one of the four city towers of Klausen, then in the Austrian Tyrol. The tower in which they were found is first recorded in 1406 and as an armoury around 1485. The sale of this group was organised by Johann Haupt, a city councillor, through the Bozen (Bolzano) art dealer Alois Überbacher (1832-1897) to the Munich antiquarian Josef Ferdinand Spengel (died 1904).

An inventory of the town of Klausen from the end of the 15th century, which is no longer extant, records a number (either fifteen or fifty) large shields and eighteen small shields. The shields are decorated with three variations of the arms shown on the present shield, which have been variously attributed, without basis, to Klausen, Waldeck, the Lordship of Sternberg, the Swabian Society of St. George, and the Knights of the Golden Spur. Their use has been attributed to the mercenaries Duke Sigismund brought to Klausen during the third quarter of the 15th Century, the Swabian League and also a contingent equipped by Emperor Maximilian I. See Profanter 2019 pp. 275 - 302 and Kaiser, Emmerich and Profanter 2019, pp. 303-325.