The Silich Collection of Historical and Art Medals

Foreword

In 2003 David and his wife Corina invited me to visit them at their home in St Moritz in Switzerland. Received with great kindness, I was able to spend a few very enjoyable days examining David’s collection of medals, but such was its scale I could hardly see everything in the time available. Medals seemed to be everywhere! This, however, was by no means the end of the story. As the present catalogue demonstrates, David continued to add to the collection for many years after my visit.

As a private collection consisting of medals from a wide range of countries, largely but not exclusively from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and many of them by the most accomplished artists in the field, it must rank among the most comprehensive and wide-ranging of its kind.

By the time of my visit to Switzerland, I had already known David for many years. A supporter of the British Art Medal Society, he had in the mid-1980s been instrumental in the society’s decision to issue large versions of a medal of Charles Dickens by the well-known caricaturist by Ronald Searle, which would be cast from the artist’s models; David proceeded to present examples of these casts to the British Museum. Many years later, in 2003, he sponsored the society’s issue of large electroformed versions of Searle’s medal of Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell.

David’s generosity towards the museum continued in the 2000s, when I was curator of the museum’s medal collection, with donations often made jointly with Corina. An early example was a French medal of around 1853, which was followed by others dating to around the time of France’s Second Republic. A gift of several of Maurice Thenot’s animal medals from the 1930s lled a noticeable gap in the museum’s collection, but the most exciting acquisition made as a result of David’s generosity was undoubtedly a portrait medal of Louis Pasteur cast in glass in 1922 by the jeweller and glass designer René Lalique. The year after this we were the grateful recipients of eighteen medals by the important early twentieth-century Austrian medallist Stefan Schwartz.

David was always ready to help with research and other projects. Among his and Corina’s gifts to the museum was a set of Sir Edward Thomason’s medals of the Holy Scriptures, which helped me with my research into the various series issued by this extraordinary Victorian gure, ultimately resulting in an article in the British Numismatic Journal. Knowing of my interest in the British medallist Frank Bowcher, he presented the museum with a framed pair of electrotypes of that artist’s Franco-British Exhibition medal of 1908, which would appear to have been previously displayed at the White City. When I identied a gap in the museum’s collection during the preparation of the 1997 British Museum exhibition Modernism in French medal design, it was to David I turned for a loan through which to ll it (for which see The Medal, 44 (2004), p. 48).

Although his principal interest as a collector was in earlier periods, David was also thoroughly engaged by contemporary medals, as indicated by the present catalogue and his involvement with the Searle medals mentioned above. Trusting in my judgement, he invited me to select a piece from an exhibition of recent medals by New Zealand artists held at London’s Simmons Gallery in 2002, which he then gave to the museum. Two years later I was allowed to choose a medal from a travelling exhibition of contemporary satirical medals, which again David donated to the collection. One of his earliest gifts had been a medal satirising Napoleon III. Although a serious collector, David also had a playful, and even irreverent, side to his character and enjoyed this sort of medal. When he discovered that the museum had a collection of modern badges, a number of protest and humorous badges were soon coming our way.

My memory of David is of an enthusiastic admirer of medallic art, a tireless collector, a genial host and a warm-hearted and generous friend.

Philip Attwood
Keeper of Coins and Medals, British Museum,
2010–2020