Collecting: Cast of Characters
June 2008
Medal collecting is decidedly not for the collector seeking bragging rights. "Connoisseurs love them because it’s an intimate thing," says Constance Yates, "a tactile as well as visual object. Many collectors keep them in a cabinet or a drawer, not out for everyone to see." She notes that in Renaissance times, medals were worn around the neck, but during the 19th century they were often framed in wood and displayed on shelves. Original velvet-lined boxes are quite sought after.
After David’s death in 1856, the art of medals was enthusiastically carried on all over Europe, especially in France. There, a veritable craze for medals took hold, with the bourgeoisie commissioning them as portraits and to commemorate milestones in their lives. Jules Clément Chaplain was the major figure in the 1870s and 1880s; his style was less aggressively three-dimensional than David’s, but very graceful and refined, as seen in his famous portrait of his wife, Sarah Gustave Simon (1890). Like David, he portrayed artists, including the great Academic Orientalist painter Gérôme. Chaplain paid particular attention to allegorical reverses; on the back of his Gérôme medal are Near Eastern images including the Blue Mosque and the Sphinx.
Toward the end of the century, the artist and industrial designer Alexandre Charpentier (the subject of a retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay earlier this year) created a minor revolution in medal making by introducing the Art Nouveau look coupled with a loose, impressionistic style. He would sit in Paris theaters, modeling the actors quickly in terracotta on a board in his lap. His artist subjects include Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Ernest Meissonier. Charpentier’s avant-garde quality is clearly visible in his medal "Le Cri," which totally breaks with even the Romantic medallic tradition by depicting the contorted face of a crying child, which seems to emerge as from a pool of water or a mist. Other great French medalists include Louis-Oscar Roty, known for his portrayals of medical and scientific men, and Ovide Yencesse, creator of a dramatic, political medal representing Serbia as a woman pierced by swords. Outside France, the American Augustus Saint-Gaudens pursued the art, and in Central and Eastern Europe, an Expressionist aesthetic came to medal making.
In 1900, Roger Marx, a tireless advocate of the art medal, saw a great future for the medium and organized a glittering exhibition in Paris. However, observes David Yates, "the First World War killed off the impulse, as it killed off so many things—not to mention people. The extraordinary epoch that started with David lasted about a hundred years." Today, medals remain to delight the hand and eye and memorialize a Romantic moment in which artists and writers were seen as worthy of being cast in bronze forever.
David & Constance Yates, New York
212.879.7758 dcyates.com
Galerie Jacques Fischer, Paris
011.33.1.42.61.17.82
After David’s death in 1856, the art of medals was enthusiastically carried on all over Europe, especially in France. There, a veritable craze for medals took hold, with the bourgeoisie commissioning them as portraits and to commemorate milestones in their lives. Jules Clément Chaplain was the major figure in the 1870s and 1880s; his style was less aggressively three-dimensional than David’s, but very graceful and refined, as seen in his famous portrait of his wife, Sarah Gustave Simon (1890). Like David, he portrayed artists, including the great Academic Orientalist painter Gérôme. Chaplain paid particular attention to allegorical reverses; on the back of his Gérôme medal are Near Eastern images including the Blue Mosque and the Sphinx.
Toward the end of the century, the artist and industrial designer Alexandre Charpentier (the subject of a retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay earlier this year) created a minor revolution in medal making by introducing the Art Nouveau look coupled with a loose, impressionistic style. He would sit in Paris theaters, modeling the actors quickly in terracotta on a board in his lap. His artist subjects include Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Ernest Meissonier. Charpentier’s avant-garde quality is clearly visible in his medal "Le Cri," which totally breaks with even the Romantic medallic tradition by depicting the contorted face of a crying child, which seems to emerge as from a pool of water or a mist. Other great French medalists include Louis-Oscar Roty, known for his portrayals of medical and scientific men, and Ovide Yencesse, creator of a dramatic, political medal representing Serbia as a woman pierced by swords. Outside France, the American Augustus Saint-Gaudens pursued the art, and in Central and Eastern Europe, an Expressionist aesthetic came to medal making.
In 1900, Roger Marx, a tireless advocate of the art medal, saw a great future for the medium and organized a glittering exhibition in Paris. However, observes David Yates, "the First World War killed off the impulse, as it killed off so many things—not to mention people. The extraordinary epoch that started with David lasted about a hundred years." Today, medals remain to delight the hand and eye and memorialize a Romantic moment in which artists and writers were seen as worthy of being cast in bronze forever.
David & Constance Yates, New York
212.879.7758 dcyates.com
Galerie Jacques Fischer, Paris
011.33.1.42.61.17.82
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
202.737.4215 nga.gov
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
212.535.7710 metmuseum.org
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