STEVENS MEDAL FOR STUDENTS IN ART

Daniel Fearon, the numismatic consultant, has just brokered the sale of an important and long-lost cast bronze medal by the painter, designer and sculptor Alfred Stevens (1817-1875), to the British Museum. In 1856 Stevens entered a competition for the design of "The Local Art Prize Medal of the Department of Science and Art". It was a competition finally won by Antoine Vechte with his high Victorian design filled with minute detail and made by the then new electrotype process. Stevens's design was quite the opposite and a wonderfully free design with three flowing figures. It is some 6 inches in diameter and uniface, as dictated by the terms of the competition and has a fine dark patina.

Philip Attwood, the retiring Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, had published back in 1992, "The Medals of Alfred Stevens" in a FIDEM publication "Designs on Posterity", where he noted Stevens's sketches and a somewhat distressed plaster model languishing in the Victoria and Albert Museum. At that time he did not know of the bronze medal, so it seems fitting that this should be his last acquisition as Keeper.

The bronze was originally in the collection of Sir Charles Holroyd (1861-1917) who was responsible for founding the collection of works by Alfred Stevens at the Tate Gallery [Tate Britain] and, indeed, it was probably lent to the memorial exhibition at the Gallery, "Works by Alfred Stevens", 15 November 1911 – 15 January 1912. It then vanished from sight to be discovered by the architect and exhibition and museum designer, Alan Irvine. It is from his collection that it finds its way to the British Museum.

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web