1779 (1789) Anthony Wayne at Stony Point Obverse Cliche. Betts-565. Bronzed tin, 53.6 mm. MS-61 (PCGS).

300.8 grains. The obverse of this piece is chocolate brown with some underlying tin showing through on high points and at the bottom of a few contact marks, while the reverse retains some of the paper this splash of hot tin was poured out on before the die was impressed into it. The sharpness is excellent, despite a bit of high point friction, and the overall eye appeal is not just excellent, it very much looks like a bronze medal from arm's length. A few marks are seen in the upper central field, and a long scratch descends from below Wayne's outstretched hand, encountering a shallow abrasion parallel to his knee, The rims are somewhat abraded. The die state is fascinating. Since this medal was never restruck, with a batch made in 1789 and then no more from those dies ever, it is interesting that the die was apparently retouched after the production of the Washington-Webster piece (at the Massachusetts Historical Society) and the bronze example in the John W. Adams Collection. There is pretty prominent spalling (aka "die rust," but not rust or an oxidizing process) in the lower right obverse field. The largest gathering of it is parallel to the S in EXERCITUS but lower toward the exergue. Where that spalling appears on those examples, on this piece there are fairly heavy die polish lines, nearly horizontal, seen between Wayne's legs and throughout that lower right field. One particularly bold file mark runs from the base of S just beneath Wayne's hat. One wonders what happened between this die being maintained in such a way and then never striking another medal again. The gold Wayne medal, carried home by Jefferson in 1789 and given to Wayne by Washington in 1790, still exists and is on display in Philadelphia. Washington's own silver one is at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a second is in Vienna at the Kunsthistoriches Museum. We now know of three bronzes: one in the British Museum, the Adams specimen that brought $84,000 in 2019, and Syd Martin's rather rough eBay cherrypick, a piece that had significant corrosion tooled off the obverse but nonetheless brought $14,400 in our Martin V sale last year. Adams and Bentley report an obverse cliche in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society in their census on page 72 of Comitia Americana. That book was published in 2007; this medal was discovered in France in 2009. Mr. Margolis kept it under wraps, and now we are all learning of its existence, together, for the first time. Including the two copper examples and now this one, there are but three medals from the original dies that a private collector can hope to acquire to represent this entry in the Comitia Americana series. Two have sold in the last five years. It is unlikely another such opportunity will arrive for this generation of collectors.

From the Richard Margolis Collection. Earlier from Maurice Doiron, January 2009.

Estimate: $10000