Hitting the Heights - A Coin of Amphipolis

At some point in your collecting you may find that the coins that you really want are just out of your reach, maybe because they are so expensive or because there are only one or two known examples sequestered in a museum or private collection. In these cases, there is sometimes the option to acquire an electrotype, a reproduction made by taking a mould of a coin and using electrolysis to deposit a thin layer of copper onto it, producing an extremely accurate replica.

The coin above is an electrotype that I recently bought of a stater minted in Amphipolis in around 362-358 BC [HGC 3.407] produced by the firm of Robert Ready. Ready (1811–1901) was a modeller and sealmaker who was engaged by the British Museum in 1859 to produce copies of its coins, medals, and seals using the then-new technique of electrotyping. He ultimately produced some 22,000 electrotypes for the museum. These come up every now and again at auctions and are quite collectable. This coin can be recognised as a product of that workshop by the R stamped on the edge, which probably indicates it was produced by his sons, who continued the firm after him. The electrotypes served both display and scholarly purposes: Barclay V. Head, who would become head of the Department of Coins and Medals, published a Guide to the Select Greek Coins Exhibited in Electrotype in the Gold Ornament Room in 1872. This coin is of the same type that is illustrated as b.7 in that work.

Although the photograph is not the best quality it is clear that the one I have acquired is a reproduction by Ready of the same coin in the British Museum collection.

The British Museum also requested Robert Ready to produce trays of electrotype coins for distribution to the other National Museums in the United Kingdom to act as a reference and learning resource for other curators. I was fortunate to be asked to identify some of these trays a couple of years ago, and looking back over some of the photographs I took for the report produced for the museum, I noticed the following.

Electrotypes make a fascinating collection in themselves as long as you are aware that they are faithful reproductions of the original coins, and they can provide one way of filling that gap in a collection.