Button for a hunter’s jacket

The button made of antlers is one of the three buttons kept in the collection of the Wilanów Varia. All three buttons have a carved spatial representation of an animal inside, which is different for each button. In the button described here, we can recognise a black grouse with lightly spread wings and a lyre-shaped tail being a characteristic feature of males in this species. The other two buttons show a black grouse and a fox’s head.

The buttons are an unusual curiosity not only because of the very sophisticated idea of carving a representation of an animal in a small format (ca. 2 cm in diameter), which required a very skilled hand. The history of these items told by their former owner (the buttons were purchased for the Museum from a private person) is also interesting. According to the account presented during the purchase, the buttons were part of a large collection of works of art and souvenirs gathered by Wacław Mieczkowski (1869–1947), a landowner from West Prussia, in his estate in Niedźwiedź located between Grudziądz and Brodnica in the Kujawy-Pomerania province. The ruins of the manor where Mieczkowski made available his systematically expanded collection to the audience before the war have survived till today. Mieczkowski supplemented his collection with items purchased, among others, in antique shops of Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Rome. The first of the aforementioned places is connected with the purchase of the object described here; along with three other buttons, the Wilanów buttons were part of the hunting uniform of the last German emperor Wilhelm II Hohenzollern (1859–1941). According to the information provided, Mieczkowski bought them at an auction of Wilhelm II’s property after his abdication in 1918.

It must be stressed that the collection gathered by Mieczkowski was very diversified and encompassed such fields as painting, graphics and drawing, sculpture, artistic craft (furniture, porcelain, glass, silvers, weapons and armament) as well as craft curiosities. The set of buttons with carved representations of animals can be classified among the latter.