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Phliasia, Phlious, ca. 400-350 BC, Æ Chalkous
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Bull butting left, head lowered and turned to face viewer.
Large Φ with two pellets.
HGC 5, 177; BCD Peloponnesos 129; Weber 3882 (this coin); MacIsaac Issue 2, G.
(14 mm, 1.60 g, 3h).
CNG Classical Numismatic Review XXXIX, 1, April 2014, 834574; ex- BCD Collection (not in LHS sale); ex- Virgil M. Brand Collection (Part 7, Sotheby’s, 25 October 1984), lot 306 (part of); ex- Sir Hermann Weber Collection, no. 3882 purchased from W.C. Thieme, Leipzig, 1888.
Provenance Notes:
Sir Hermann David Weber (1823-1918) was a German physician who had a very distinguished lifetime career in medicine in England, including that of being a doctor to the royal family. Collecting from the late 1870’s, he amassed one of the largest private collections of ancient Greek coins of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It consisted of over 8,500 coins in total. Weber purchased this humble Phlious chalkous in 1888 from the dealer W.C. Thieme, Leipzig. Spink and Son purchased the collection from the executors of Weber’s estate, with the condition that the firm undertake the publication of the collection. This was duly completed by the mid-1920’s in a four-volume work that remained a standard reference for ancient Greek coinage throughout much of the twentieth century. Spink and Son dispersed the Weber collection, from whence this coin found its way into the collection of the prominent American collector Virgil M Brand.
Virgil M. Brand (1862-1926), born into a wealthy American brewing family in Chicago, developed an interest in coin collecting in 1889 and amassed one of the greatest private collections of all time, consisting of 368,000 ancient and modern coins including 68,000 gold coins. Each coin in the collection was documented by an entry in what became a thirty-volume set of descriptive ledgers. A lifetime bachelor and somewhat eccentric character, Brand chose to live modestly in a small apartment above his brewery in Chicago, shunning ostentation and devoting his time to the pursuit of his collecting, reading and local charity. He spent over $3 million on coins during his life. The collection was housed in cigar boxes that were packed into leather satchels, hidden behind his book collection. Virgil M. Brand died intestate and amongst various probate disputes his two brothers began to sell off the most prominent pieces from the collection in the 1930’s. Eventually, Jane Brand Allen, a niece of Virgil M. Brand, inherited the remains of the collection. These coins were sold in a series of auctions conducted by Sotheby’s, Bowers and Merena and Spink and Son during the 1980’s.
By this means the coin came into the collection of BCD the pre-eminent collector of mainland Greek coins during the last half of the twentieth century. BCD disposed of the coins of the Peloponnesos from his collection in 2006 at which time this coin passed into the inventory of the Classical Numismatic Group from whom it was purchased after its listing in the first edition of the newly revived Classical Numismatic Review produced by the company in April 2014.
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