Provenance

[Ricky H]

I recently bought a coin from a French auction house and it said it had a provenance from the AJRR collection. I don’t have anymore information than that. Does anyone know anymore information about that collector or have any advice on how to track down more details on the provenance?

Thanks!

[Carausius]

I would start by asking the auction house for more information.  Many auction houses have biographies of such collectors that they will share if asked.  I have had luck with this approach in the past. Results will likely depend on whether the collector is living and wishes to remain anonymous.  Googling the information you provided, I found one French firm that had 100 or more coins from this collection.  If that's not the auction house you bought from, you might also try asking them for information.  Good luck.

[Ricky H]

Thanks. I will do that. I had assumed when I ordered it that there may be more details sent with the coin but when I received the coin and there wasn’t any info included, I figured they weren’t going to share anymore.

[Andrew McCabe]

There's often amazing information available from google searches on provenance names. You might stumble across information that shows a collector was especially interested in graphic design and typefaces on which he published a book in Italy in the 1930s before selling his collection during the short-lived post surrender restored Mussolini regime in north Italy 1944-45, and probably the collection was an inspiration for his work. Or an obituary that relates specific travels in Europe in the 1960s. Totally unexpected and random stuff. It's worth putting some effort into searching for possible leads.

But, as a caveat, a purely letter-initial collector tag such as AJRR, with no hints of who the person was or is, can be a rather frustrating dead-end. One tactic that is sometimes effective, if its a good coin and you can see both the collecting interest areas and geographic location, is to look for names in numismatics that might correspond. Didn't take long in 2011 for some collectors to notice that RBW was the initials of an associate at the ANS who also published quite a bit.

[Andrew McCabe]

There's often amazing information available from google searches on provenance names. You might stumble across information that shows a collector was especially interested in graphic design and typefaces on which he published a book in Italy in the 1930s before selling his collection during the short-lived post surrender restored Mussolini regime in north Italy 1944-45, and probably the collection was an inspiration for his work. Or an obituary that relates specific travels in Europe in the 1960s. Totally unexpected and random stuff. It's worth putting some effort into searching for possible leads.

A practical example from TODAY. I was looking at a coin in my collection whose provenance I had noted as
- CNG e250 (23 Feb. 2011) lot 250 ex
- Bank Leu & Spink & NAC Ceresio 3 (3 Oct.1992) lot 154
But I bought the coin in 2014 so there was a gap to explain. I went into my 2014 purchase records and found I'd actually bought it in a VAauctions sale but not noted in the provenance presumably as I thought it unimportant. However knowing there's a VAuctions archive, I went in to find the coin. Below its record was noted as "Ivar Gault collection". I didn't know whether that was between 2011 and 2014, between 1992 and 2011, or prior to 1992. So I went to the CNG esale records which didn't mention a collector name. Then I went to ACsearch and put in Ivar Gault. It found a few coins that referenced the same VAuction sale in 2014, which means the collector name was in the most recent period. Then I started googling. I found a website for a Norwegian family ivargault.com but I was sure I had hit a dead end as the family history did not include the word "coin", "roman" or "ancient". Not him for sure. So googled again and this time the next link Ivar Gault Coins was to a LinkedIn page. That gave the home town of the Ivar Gault (the coin guy!) as Ostfold in Norway. Googled again with Ostfold and up comes the same website I'd thought a dead end. So I went back to the home page of the website and found the image per first pic below. Now I'm getting somewhere as he explicitly includes a link to "Antique Coins" on his family home page. That clicked through to a menu for Roman coins and its subdivisions. Bingo.

So despite the family bio not mentioning a word about the ancient world I'd found the right person. Now I went back to the family bio and read it with renewed interest. Ivar Gault was born in 1947, son of a Norwegian soldier who met his Scottish mother in Lossiemouth airbase in 1944, and unusually took his mum's family name. In later life Ivar partnered with another Norwegian war baby, Ernst, this time the son of a German soldier stationed in Norway and a local woman, who also met in 1944. The German father turned into an avowed communist after the war and apparently died of heartbreak for the tragic loss of communism when the Berlin war came down. Although Ivar only owned my coin for three years, this was interesting enough bio that I am of course now going to mention the provenance of my coin, a very pretty corn-ear denarius from the middle of the second Punic war (pic below).

This is a very typical story of how you research collector provenances.

[Ricky H]

That is a really neat story!  It’s pretty cool how you connected the dots and the result was worth the effort.  I’m still a fairly new collector but it’s surprising to me that it’s not more common to have provenance attached to most coins.

I will continue trying to track down more info on the provenance name for my coin but so far I haven’t had any luck. The dealer that I bought the coin from isn’t responding to my emails requesting more info. I’ve tried various google searches but so far I haven’t stumbled across any promising leads.

[Andrew McCabe]

That is a really neat story!  It’s pretty cool how you connected the dots and the result was worth the effort.  I’m still a fairly new collector but it’s surprising to me that it’s not more common to have provenance attached to most coins.

A key reason is the substantial paperwork burden and/or transcription burden. It's a lot of time and effort for a dealer to transcribe all the information a selling collector provides onto tags as well as onto the web description instead of just pasting a standard description. For any coin worth less than an awful lot of money it isn't worth the time. Good collectors carefully make small neat tags with the relevant information in tiny print; there's a better chance it doesn't get dumped if there's just a single comprehensive tag that explains everything. Sometimes I'm a bad collector and when I sell coins I include the provenance information including receipts etc, and it's a wad about the size of a cigarette pack per coin. That's why the provenances aren't kept.