Three Faces of George III 1801

[constanius]

LINK TO ORIGINAL POSTThis is BHM#515 the first image is of my example struck from an unfinished die.


Thanks to Philip Atwood & the British Museum for the pictures of their 2 examples of this obverse, which show the further work done to the die with copy/reducing lines. The cheeks have been further engraved & the rear of what appeared to be part of the neck morphs into the lower part of the ribbon. There is also more detail in the hair & the upper part of the ribbon. Also the missing parts of the 'E's have been added. In the far right example the pronounced seperation between cheek, jaw & chin has been totally lost. Oh, and the copy/reducing lines have disappeared!

Brown & Fauver only list this in brass, my example is bronze.

Very rare, if not unique, to find 3 examples of a 200+ year old medal each reflecting different stages of the developement of the die. Bear in mind this medal is only 14mm & without any magnification none of this would be very noticeable to the naked eye.

[elverno]

[bill]

 

A second

[Art]

And a third.

 

 

I have never seen a comparison like this done before. It's superb.

[ccg]

fourthed

[yarm]

Re: "copy/reducing lines"

 

Tell me more about this! The circular pattern in the dies also appears in Conder tokens that I thought were hand engraved (but maybe not!) Might a circular pattern around a center dot been etched in a die to help guide the hand engraving of the legend, wreaths, or is this exclusively an artifact of machine work.

 

 

 

 

[constanius]

Good question Yarm, & great tokens.

 

"In 1790, Boulton learned of the die-engraving machine of Jean Baptiste Bartlemey Dupeyrat (1759-1834) and obtained one for his Soho Mint. It was utilized there to do what it did in other mints – reducing the main device from an oversize metal pattern, then employed hand engravers to add lettering and small symbols by hand punches"

 

 

LINK TO SOME MORE EXAMPLES Scroll to the last post to see 5 more.

 

This image is from that post

 

What makes this even more special is the copy/reducing lines visible both on the obverse & reverse. The obverse copy/reducing lines are even visible on the lettering & the denticles which shows even these were machine cut in the die. Boulton had expressed the wish(1797) “I look to the time when it can cut the entire side of a coin or medal, not just the device.” this because the engraving machines then available only cut the central image, the lettering was then hand punched into the die. This shows that by 1817 improvements had been made to the machine-engravers to enable the complete die to be machine-cut & just hand-finished by polishing etc.

 

 

 

PREVIOUS POST

2 different versions of the same medal, what to me is exciting is that the second brass example was struck from the same die that I already posted another brass medal with copying lines visible, but before this striking the die has been further engraved & polished. You can still see some of the copying lines though.

 

As you can see the early copying/reducers could not fully cut the centre of the die, this had to be hand-finished, which is the case of the above examples, first one the centre is not cut, second example, same die but hand-engraved centre.

 

Sorry if this is a bit thrown together but I am removing an old shower unit & installing a new one, just on a beer break