The Silich Collection of Historical and Art Medals (Part II)

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...