A BEAR OF BERNE CHESS SET, 19th century

A "BEAR OF BERNE" PEARWOOD FIGURAL CHESS SET, Switzerland, late 19th century, one side in a darked coloured wood, kings and queens as bears wearing crowns and holding sceptres, bishops as bears holding staffs, knights as bears with smaller bears riding on their backs, rooks as turrets surmounted with bears' heads, pawns as smaller bears, the king 9.5cm high, the pawn 6.3cm high.

***Provenance: The Gemmell Chess Collection Literature:. Phillips New Bond Street: The Ernst Boehlen Chess Collection, Monday 9th November 1998, lot 75 for a similar set. Bears have enjoyed -or suffered- a long and rather one-sided relationship with the Swiss capital of Berne. According to one legend, Berthold V of Zähringen named Berne after the first animal killed in a hunt in 1191. If the story is true, the Duke must have decided to honour the victim's entire species, since "Bären" is the German plural of "bear". The 1923 edition of Muirhead's Switzerland explains: Whatever the real connection of the words "bear" and "Berne", the figure of a bear occurs in the oldest known city seal (1224), and living bears have been kept in Berne at the town's expense since 1513, except for a brief interval when the French removed them to Paris in 1798. .