J.C.S. Rashleigh coll. Arria

[Andrew McCabe]

A couple of months ago I bought the below pictured, and rare, Arrius Secundus denarius. I paid rather much for it. A few months ago I bought a pile of old Glendinings catalogues, and also paid too much for them. By "too much", I mean in both cases perhaps double what I'd have considered an attractive price. Stupid me. Today I was going through the Glendinings pile and chucking stuff without relevant photos of Roman Republican coins. I was about to chuck the 14th January 1953 sale of the J.C.S. Rashleigh collection, whose plates seemed to mostly include late Roman and Byzantine coins when I spotted a note I'd written on the cover saying 23 Republican coins were illustrated. Checking a little more carefully, the Republican coins came AFTER the Byzantine pieces, and among them, lot 413, my Arria. It sort of assuages the guilt for having overpaid for both the coin and the catalogues!

[gordian_guy]

Congratulations Andrew on a serendipitous save from guilt!! Wonderful coin by the way!

c.rhodes

[areich]

I would have thought a coin like this was almost guaranteed to have a noteworthy provenance.

[Carausius]

   Terrific coin and a good story that helps assuage some of the guilt I am feeling this week.  For the past several months and accelerating in the last few weeks, I've gone a bit overboard acquiring auction catalogues that are either listed on Spring's "Top struck Republican Coin sales" appendix or that are otherwise recommended to me.  Mostly inexpensive,  low-hanging fruit, but even these begin to add-up after a while.  I think I am about one-third to one-half through Spring's list, but ohhh that second half will cost me dearly....  In any event, while I have yet to find any of my own coins in catalogues where I did not expect them, your post gives me hope and justification.

[Andrew McCabe]

 Terrific coin and a good story that helps assuage some of the guilt I am feeling this week.  For the past several months and accelerating in the last few weeks, I've gone a bit overboard acquiring auction catalogues that are either listed on Spring's "Top struck Republican Coin sales" appendix or that are otherwise recommended to me.  Mostly inexpensive,  low-hanging fruit, but even these begin to add-up after a while.  I think I am about one-third to one-half through Spring's list, but ohhh that second half will cost me dearly....  In any event, while I have yet to find any of my own coins in catalogues where I did not expect them, your post gives me hope and justification.

Thanks Michael

Your mention of Spring's list prompts me to bump/nudge my own recently published webpage which is intended to take Spring a level deeper by explaining what's actually in all those cited plates and by list some important sales with fewer plates of very high quality coins

http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/RRAuctions.html

I've had a decent rate of success with provenancing unprovenanced coins. Some may be due to pattern matching and good memories of my own pieces. But a lot is due I think to buying coins that sing "old provenance please find me". That's rarely just a question of toning, but some combination of a particular tone that doesn't look like it was made yesterday using hard boiled egg, and a rather nice strike irrespective of actual wear. The old collectors were much more interested in a pretty overall coin than whether it graded EF or VF. They liked surfaces and nice strikes but were hardly bothered about wear. Hence very lovely but merely nice VF toned coins can be those that spring an old provenance. The modern fetish for sharpness over beauty, caused in part by slabbing companies who only grade sharpness and not beauty, means that high end collectors are in many cases buying ugly unprovenanced coins, whilst leaving the beautiful coins for you and me.

[Andrew McCabe]

I had three minutes to kill this afternoon, waiting for a picture file to upload to a memory stick in a dealer's premises, and for no particular reason at all my eyes wasted those seconds considering the variations in spine colour on a bookshelf beside me. For an odd reason, some impulse compelled me to pull out a black spined paperback, and looking at its cover I realised it was an auction catalogue from a firm called Merzbacher. I knew that this wasn't a dealer name that usually sold Roman Republican, but I'd a niggling memory that I'd come across the name before in the context of my review of antiquarian auction catalogues which I put online about a year ago.
http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/RRAuctions.html#oldauctions

I flicked the plates with no especial expectations, wondering when that upload would finish, anyway seeing nothing but Greek silver followed by Roman Imperial, when I had the odd feeling that something I recognised had caught my eye in the fraction of the second each page took to flip. So I looked back a little more carefully to find the intersection of Greek coinage and the Roman Empire, and found (not for the first time) the coin illustrated below. Well well well. To think of all those hours and days when I was actively trying to locate provenances. To mix one or two metaphors, this provenance stood up in my soup and bit me in the bum (NB these may not be familiar to those across the pond, but a general sense of surprise when something you were not even thinking of jumps out at you may be assumed)

The front page is pretty interesting I think, with its various annotations and stamps, starting from Spink at the top, with Greek and Italian additions. After copying the relevant bits I cast an eye on my web-page, and found that I'd written exactly the following:

MERZBACHER
Spring 432 Eugen Merzbacher 02 Nov 1909
- 3237 lots 30 plates
- RR 36 illustrated on 2 plates.
- 36 RR listed. No weights. Mostly GVF-EF.
- 25 silver incl. exceptional Antia Bucranium altar sestertius, Labienus Parthian horse 524, Octavian wreath spear phalera 513, Antony LEG PRI and LEG XXV both false, Cassius crab 505, LENT MARC COS Ephesus 445, attractive Scarpus Octavian Jupiter Ammon Victory on globe 546, Murcus trophy 510, Caesar Octavian facing busts Agrippa 534
 -11 gold incl. Cassius tripod 498, Norbana Africa 491, Caesar portrait 490, Caesar Plancus half aureus 475, two Vibia Venus 494, Cassius jug lituus 500, Clodia Sol 494


Spring indicates that Merzbacher hosted perhaps 30 sales between 1886 and 1921, but this was the sole one to feature on my webpage. One wonders what guides our actions(auctions). I'm glad to see that, with no foreknowledge, I'd called the coin as seen on the plate "exceptional". Merzbacher rated it vorzüglich as did, 106 years later, Kuenker. Glendinings rated it merely very fine. It was tough to prize an EF rating out of Glendining.

[Carausius]

That's beyond serendipitous. Unbelievable!!  Like the catalogue was calling-out to you!  


Edi: Is that Michael Vlasto's stamp on the cover of the catalogue?

[Andrew McCabe]

That's beyond serendipitous. Unbelievable!!  Like the catalogue was calling-out to you!  

Edi: Is that Michael Vlasto's stamp on the cover of the catalogue?

Dunno. Indeed it seems so from a transliteration of the Greek text. Evidently the catalogue doesn't belong to me, so beyond the surprise today I didn't pay it much attention, and focused instead on getting a scan.

It's a fairly regular event that I buy an unprovenanced but toned coin and then bump into its provenances, though in this case the provenance bumped into me. I've a pretty high hit rate.

[Meepzorp]

Hi Andrew,

That's a beautiful coin, and an interesting story!

Meepzorp

[carthago]

I had three minutes to kill this afternoon, waiting for a picture file to upload to a memory stick in a dealer's premises, and for no particular reason at all my eyes wasted those seconds considering the variations in spine colour on a bookshelf beside me. For an odd reason, some impulse compelled me to pull out a black spined paperback, and looking at its cover I realised it was an auction catalogue from a firm called Merzbacher. I knew that this wasn't a dealer name that usually sold Roman Republican, but I'd a niggling memory that I'd come across the name before in the context of my review of antiquarian auction catalogues which I put online about a year ago.
http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/RRAuctions.html#oldauctions

I flicked the plates with no especial expectations, wondering when that upload would finish, anyway seeing nothing but Greek silver followed by Roman Imperial, when I had the odd feeling that something I recognised had caught my eye in the fraction of the second each page took to flip. So I looked back a little more carefully to find the intersection of Greek coinage and the Roman Empire, and found (not for the first time) the coin illustrated below. Well well well. To think of all those hours and days when I was actively trying to locate provenances. To mix one or two metaphors, this provenance stood up in my soup and bit me in the bum (NB these may not be familiar to those across the pond, but a general sense of surprise when something you were not even thinking of jumps out at you may be assumed)

The front page is pretty interesting I think, with its various annotations and stamps, starting from Spink at the top, with Greek and Italian additions. After copying the relevant bits I cast an eye on my web-page, and found that I'd written exactly the following:

This whole post stirs a wide range of emotions in me, but particularly this story.  As you know, Andrew, we both share a certain joy in finding old provenances for our coins and you have done so well capturing the experience in your post.  I find the hunt to be the vast majority of my enjoyment in coin collecting and attempting to find old provenances for my coins extends the hunt almost indefinitely.  It's also funny how you manage to find things when you least expect it.  

I have a coin from the 1909 Merzbacher sale as well, purchased at the same sale as your Arria completely unprovenanced (yet screaming for one), and found by accident after acquisition in a similar manner as you describe.  I can relate to you joy!  

Edited:  Merzbacher described the coin as F.d.c. in 1909 whereas it was described in 2015 as fast vorzügliches

[Andrew McCabe]

That Brutus was especially nice and one I considered competing on. I went back today to check the Merzbacher sale. It, oddly for today, had Roman before Greek which was not what I recalled in my confusion on Friday. And that's why my coin caught my eye as it was at the start on plate 1 (though my later recollection "corrected" it to being between Greek and Roman).

My quest is actually for the best coins on a low budget. Provenances are more a retrospective approval of my taste. I've got the same condition target for silver bronze and aes grave: ordinary EF. For silver, that's achievable at a high cost for common but beautiful coins. Provenance finds can be a real value added in a difficult area. For bronze its achievable at a low cost but the difficulty is that such coins are extremely rare so it needs perseverance. For aes grave , condition has little bearing on price so if one waits eventually one finds great coins. As for gold, ordinary VF is good enough for me as it alllows me to form a complete RR collection without neglecting anything. Republican bronzes remain one of the few blue sky spaces in the main Greek and Roman series. I buy whatever high quality coins I can get. A beautiful EF sesterius-sized as can be had for a tiny fraction of what a beautiful EF Imperial sestertius goes for. It won't always the case, and historically wasn't so.

[curtislclay]

Merzbacher described the coin as F.d.c. in 1909 whereas it was described in 2015 as fast vorzügliches

You must have left out a word after "vorzügliches": maybe "Prachtexemplar" or "Kabinettstück"?

Ah, found the text in CoinArchives: "Hervorragend zentriertes, fast vorzügliches Exemplar mit herrlicher Patina", i.e. "Excellently centered, almost EF specimen with a magnificent patina".

[Andrew McCabe]

My already heavily provenanced Arria ex
- Glendinings 14th January 1953 J.C.S. Rashleigh collection lot 453
- Eugen Merzbacher 02 Nov 1909


and which I bought with no provenance at all, has just gained another medal:

Rodolfo Ratto 8 February 1928, Collections of Colonel R.H. Morcom (whose grandson I know), Rev. A.W. Hands and Mr. Julius Wertheim, lot 921. Despite going through Morcom Hands a few times, I never recognised my coin because the reverse was upside down.

Right beside lot 921 was a rather large sestertius of C.Antius Restio lot 908 above a regular sized one lot 909, and described as an unpublished quinarius (1.39 grams). My own example of this type below:



is also of quinarius weight (1.82 grams) and of similar style to the Morcom Hands coin. Checking Banti he shows a photo of a third similar coin which he describes as a Cigoi forgery, and refers to a book by Brunetti written in 1966 (reviewed in NC 1969). Quite possibly this is a genuine and unpublished quinarius type of Antia - nothing in my coin is especially suspicious, including flan, edges etc. Does anyone have Brunetti's "Opus Monetale Cigoi" to see why Brunetti thought coins of this specific type as having been made in the studio of Cigoi (late 19th century)?

[Carausius]

  That's a great sale to be able to cite.  Your coin has obviously appealed to the discriminating taste of many important collectors!

[crispina]

What fascinating coins, Andrew!

I don't have access to Brunetti's book (although the British Library has a copy, so maybe you could look at it there next time you are near St. Pancras, if nobody here has a copy?), but I am procrastinating cleaning the house today and found the following reference, which might possibly be relevant.  I don't speak French, so I can't say with certainty, but this 1846 book of the royal French collection might be of interest - see the description of 446 & 447 (the link should open to the correct page, I hope).

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433066615570;view=1up;seq=454

Luigi Cigoi lived from 1811 to 1876, so an 1846 reference to a Restia quinarius with a bucranium doesn't necessarily prove anything, but it still might be worth looking into.  Please accept my apologies in advance if my lack of French makes this a wild goose chase.