The Jonathan K. Kern Collection of Electrotypes and Forgeries
Museum Electrotypes
Ashmolean Museum

419, Lot: 582. Estimate $100. Sold for $475. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

GREEK, Thrace. Ainos. Circa 412/1-410/09 BC. AR “Tetradrachm” (23mm, 13.75 g, 1h). Ashmolean Museum electrotype (marked A on edge). Head of Hermes right, wearing petasos with studded rim / Goat standing right; AIN-I above, herm to right; all within incuse square. Cf. BMC 3 (for type); cf. Head, Guide Period II B 2 (same). Good VF, toned.

CNG is pleased to present the Jonathan K. Kern Collection of Electrotypes and Forgeries. This collection consists of 70 lots of coin copies, spanning the late eighteenth to mid twentieth centuries. The electrotypes in this collection were originally officially sanctioned copies of specimens in public collections – in this case, the Ashmolean and the British Museum. They were not meant to deceive, but were to be employed as teaching aids for numismatists who might not be able to see the genuine coins in the collection, and serve as display examples for individuals who wished to be able to have an example of specific coins. In this collection the majority of the electrotype lots were produced by the British Museum, most under the auspices of Robert Cooper Ready and his sons between 1859 and 1931. A skilled seal maker and modeler, these electrotypes are known by the letters RR stamped on the coin’s edge. They are highly sought-after collectables in their own right. At one point, a large portion of the coin collection was electrotyped, which proved to be widely popular with Museum customers and art enthusiasts. However, later unscrupulous individuals used these electrotypes to deceive the unwary, and the British Museum halted the process. Lot 585 obviously used the BM electrotype of this coin as the basis the forgery here, as it does not exist with an undertype and which is unknown for the original series.

The forgeries in this collection come from some of the most famous forgers of classical coins. Like the Museum electrotypes, these “coins” served similar academic and artistic functions and have themselves also become collectable in their own right. The names represented here – Becker, Caprara, Christodoulos, and Cigoii – were artists and collectors who either were naïve in what they were doing, or saw an opportunity to go over to the dark side and produce deceptive coins. Becker and Cigoi were especially prolific, producing “coins” of ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. These “coins” are often of high artistic merit, making them highly sought by modern forgers, who use them for their own nefarious purposes. The so-called “Festa” forger, who produced the Velia distater (lot 650), is a particularly dangerous early 20th century forgery (circa 1937), difficult to detect, and not discovered as a fake until the mid 1990s. The same is the case with the Leovigild tremissis (lot 651). Around since at least the nineteenth century and deriving from a line drawing in Heiss of the original fake, the type was produced in the seventeenth century to create an illustration of the Valence mint under the Visigoths. The result is an academically interesting fake of a fake.

For more information on these electrotypes, particularly the work of the Readys, as well as information on forgeries, see Classical Deception by Wayne G. Sayles, or visit the Numismatic Bibliomania Society’s The E-Sylum eNewsletter Archive (http://www.coinbooks.org/club_nbs_esylum_archive.html)