Undated (ca. 1762) Benjamin Franklin, L.L.D. Medal. Betts-545, Greenslet GM-1. Bronze. MS-63 BN (NGC).37 mm. Struck with a blank reverse die with a raised rim. Attractive dark chocolate-brown with generally smooth, glossy surfaces. A small swirl of ancient verdigris in the expansive reverse field is noted for accuracy, as are a few faint handling marks and spots in the left obverse field. Original planchet texture in the reverse field, close to center, is as made and not uncommon for the type. The tiny raised die flaw on the same side is seen on all genuine specimens. The portrait of Franklin is bold and well realized and shows only the faintest inkling of friction.<p>This important medal is widely considered the first medallic portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Unsigned, the authorship of the portrait has been attributed to Isaac Gosset by Charles Coleman Sellers (<em>Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture</em>, where he suggests the die was accomplished by William Mossop of Dublin) and to Patience Wright by Daniel Fearon, who suggests John Kirk engraved the obverse. Interestingly, Gossets portrait of General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, was turned into a medal by John Kirk, an effort whose work and striking texture is quite similar to this medal. The original Patience Wright portrait of Franklin is not certain to have survived, but wax portraits of him that are attributed to her do bear a striking resemblance to this profile. The dating of this medal has usually been placed in the early 1760s, soon after Franklin received his honorary Doctor of Laws (L.L.D.) degree from St. Andrews in Edinburgh (1759), the University of Edinburgh (1762), and Oxford (1762). However, most Revolutionary War-era portraits of Franklin that were engraved or printed in England referred to him with his honorary degree suffix, so this could just as easily be a medal from the 1770s as the 1760s. It is almost certainly earlier than the 1777 B. Franklin of Philadelphia medal, which shows him in the character of an American tradesman more than his typical pre-Revolutionary character as an honorable man of science, but it is not necessarily 15 years earlier.<p>That two of these were in the Ford collection, a collection of collections if there ever was one, should not be an indication of its commonness. Fords two, offered as lots 330 and 331 in our (Stacks) Ford XIV sale, came from the Virgil Brand collection and the Wayte Raymond estate. Brands came from his 1909 purchase of the Dr. Thomas Hall collection and had likely been off the market for at least a century when it sold in 2006. Raymonds could have been acquired at any point during his half-century career and was hidden from view for nearly as long, so Fords pair of these represented not just two medals, but essentially a centurys worth of public offerings. The piece in the May 2001 LaRiviere sale had been acquired decades earlier from George Fuld, who owned it in the mid 1950s when wrote the first catalog of Franklin medals, a work that was published in <em>The Numismatist</em> in December 1956. The piece in our January 2005 Americana sale from the Gilbert Steinberg collection had been previously off the market since 1973. The only other specimen sold publicly within recent memory is the John W. Adams that realized $3,818.75 in our November 2015 Baltimore Auction; it had been held privately, in the collections of Ted Craige and Mr. Adams, since at least 1967 when it was acquired by Craige. In a half century, just five of these have sold at auction, two of which had been off the market for the better part of a century and the others of which had been held for periods of at least 30 years.Sold by the Yale University Art Gallery for the benefit of acquisition funds of the Numismatic Collection.
