Medals

For centuries, the medal had no other vocation than to serve the glory of the sovereign, the powerful, and institutions linked to power. Still under the Second Empire, new models were created mainly to commemorate the main events of the reign (accession, marriage, birth, treaty, official visit, etc.) and the life of institutions (administrations, academies, professional organizations, etc.), or for awards given at exhibitions and competitions. 

The training of engravers was essentially done at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which since 1804 has awarded a Prix de Rome for engraving in medals and fine stones, distinct from that of sculpture. Until 1893, minting was the object of a monopoly held by the Medal Mint (Monnaie des Médailles), an institution long attached to the Maison du Roi, before being reunited in 1832 with the Monnaie des Espèces (Coins Mint) and coming under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.In this context, artists were not encouraged to innovate, and tended to reproduce accepted formulas.

It is only from the 1860s that things began to change, with a gradual relaxation in the training of engravers and the beginning of diversification of their activity. The medal commemorating the jubilee of the perpetual secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Joseph Naudet, by Hubert Ponscarme, marked a turning point in 1867 that is difficult for us to measure today because it seems so timid. Critics, and then historians of the medal, however, noticed the audacity of removing the listel (raised border), as well as the softness of the design, the novelty of the typographical characters, etc.

In 1888, the painter Léon Bonnat noted how far it had come in a speech given at the Académie des Beaux-Arts on the occasion of the reception of the great medalist Oscar Roty. "For twenty years we have been witnessing a rebirth, a well-made resurrection to delight the hearts of artists. Next to our admirable school of sculpture, relying upon it, has arisen an art almost new to us. An art born yesterday, so to speak, that has immediately taken its place and is today in full bloom, in all its blossoming. This art is the engraving of medals." In fact, Roty, one of Ponscarme's many students, played a leading role in the renovation of this art, notably through the ambitiousness of his compositions and the reintroduction of rectangular plaquettes.

The following year, the first retrospective of French medal art was included in the centennial exhibition of French art organized as part of the 1889 Universal Exhibition. The popular and critical success of this event definitively asserted the international recognition of the French medalists. The two most famous medalists, Oscar Roty and Jules-Clément Chaplain, then proposed to give the State the sets of medals that they had presented during the Exhibition. 

This event led to the creation, in 1890, of an art of the medal section within the Musée du Luxembourg. The curator, Léonce Bénédite, would work to develop this collection in the following years, with the support of influential personalities such as the art critic Roger Marx. Although the funds made available to him did not allow him to make many purchases, he did manage to attract donations from most of the major medalists of the time, such as Louis Bottée, Daniel-Dupuis, Alphée Dubois, Louis-Eugène Mouchon, Auguste Patey, among others. 

In order to complete series, or to obtain certain models at a lower cost, Bénédite did not hesitate to ask the Monnaie de Paris to mint a copy especially for his museum, or to obtain proofs made by electroplating.

Finally, as for the other techniques, he wished to open the collection up to foreign artists. He then appealed to Belgian (Godefroid Devreese), Austrian (Heinrich Kautsch), Italian (Trentacoste) or American (MacMonnies, Saint-Gaudens) medalists to add their works. It should be noted, however, that the latter often had some connection with France, through their training or artistic practice.

The collection bears witness to the two major technical evolutions that accompanied the development of production, offering artists new possibilities of expression: the revival of the melted medal, and the use of the reduction lathe.

With the development of the use of the pendulum press in the seventeenth century, minting gradually became the main production method for medals. In the middle of the 19th century, however, many artists and amateurs became passionate about the medallions and plaquettes of the great masters of the Renaissance (e.g., Pisanello and Matteo de’Pasti). Created by casting metal in a mold taken from a model, these old works inspired a new production, intended for a public of amateurs. The number of copies was limited, but the fused medals could be larger in size and freer in their shapes, to the point of resembling small decorative bas-reliefs to be hung on the wall. 

The reduction lathe, on the other hand, was a machine typical of the many efforts made in the 19th century to facilitate, accelerate and multiply the production of objects. It was no longer necessary for the artist to master the techniques of medal engraving; he could model a work two to three times larger than the expected result. The lathe then mechanically engraved the die from the large model created by the artist, at the desired reduction factor.

These technical developments helped liberate and stimulate the creativity of the medalists, in an era marked by a great exuberance of artistic production. Here we can see the development of so-called "pictorial" tendencies, more descriptive and less allegorical. Some artists embarked on increasingly complex compositions, articulated on several planes linked by a perspective. Others preferred to depart from the requirement of graphic sharpness to experiment with a highly nuanced modeling, sometimes referred to as the école du flou (school of blur) and compared to the art of the painter Eugène Carrière.

Like that of 1889, the Universal Exhibition of 1900 was another success for French medal art, and the Musée du Luxembourg continued its acquisitions. However, its popularity waned in the 1910s, and the First World War only accentuated the decline in demand and production. If the 1920s and 1930s saw a new phase in the flowering of the medal thanks to the Art Deco movement, the Second World War was fatal: the golden age of the medal was well and truly over.

In 1937, the closure of the Musée du Luxembourg led to the transfer of its collections, and the medals were divided between the sculpture department of the Musée du Louvre and the new Musée National d'Art Moderne. And yet neither of these two institutions had the space, or the real desire, to present them to the public. The creation of the Musée d'Orsay in 1986 brought together most of the former art of the medal section.An important selection of these works has been presented to the public on a permanent basis since the exhibition “In the Palm of the Hand," organized in 2012 in partnership with several other institutions.

The Musée d'Orsay regularly acquires medals to complete its collections. One of the most significant acquisitions is Oscar Roty's study for his famous Semeuse [The Sower] designed in 1887 as a medal project for the French Ministry of Agriculture, which the artist reused ten years later to adorn the face of the new coins struck by the Mint.

More recently, the museum was able to acquire several medallions by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (in 2000), a set of award medals won by the Monduit company in numerous exhibitions over its long existence (in 2003), and lots from the workshop collections of the medalists Alexis André (in 2017) and Charles Pillet (in 2018).