Offering for sale here before going to auction: Leopold Bernard Henry Pattern Rifle|Winchester Swap Meet|Forum|Winchester Collector

I am offering this gun for sale to this Winchester Community prior to signing a consignment deal with RIAC. Figured we could “Keep it in the club” if anyone has interest, otherwise, let the world take a crack at it. 

This is a Henry pattern rifle Dated 1870 and marked “LEOPOLD BERNARD CANNONIER A PARIS,” on the underside of the damascus steel barrel. This extraordinary French lever-action repeating rifle has a documented collector history stretching back more than six decades. By 1962, it was in the collection of Robert F. Wolfskill and featured in Shooting Times in the article “A French Henry Rifle.” In 1992, it was again documented by C.W. Slagle in The Winchester Repeater and illustrated in R.L. Wilson’s landmark book Winchester: An American Legend, pp. 16–17. The rifle later appeared at major firearms auctions, including Little John’s in 1998, Lot 776, and James D. Julia in 2003 and 2007, giving it an unusually strong published and auction-record trail for such a rare experimental arm. It ultimately remained in the Ladd Hellenbrand collection before being gifted in 2026 to me, preserving an exceptional chain of provenance around what appears to be a highly unusual, possibly one-off French interpretation/collaboration of the Henry/Winchester repeating-rifle system.

I’m asking $20,000 OBO, and the rifle includes original copies of all the provenance publications mentioned above. 

Feel free to PM me for more pictures and details.