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Comments on "William Gardner, Coin Designer"

Started by <k>, April 17, 2011, 04:00:28 PM

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<k>

PARENT TOPIC: William Gardner, Coin Designer.


Heraldic heresy.gif


This cartoon is reproduced from The Heraldry Gazette:

As a student at the Royal College of Art, Gardner drew for fun a page of heraldic lions in poses which an officer of arms might never be likely to have thought of. It is, of course, the sort of thing one might expect a young, high-spirited and rather irreverent student to do, and it is unlikely that the thought crossed his mind that the page would survive and be studied seventy years or so later.

Heraldics as you've never seen them before.
Visit the website of The Royal Mint Museum.

See: The Royal Mint Museum.

Figleaf

I have always liked the Cyprus set. It captures ancient Cypriot art very well, yet it's made totally accessible by a mild degree of abstraction. Compare the present 1 and 2 euro; ancient art also, but much harder to understand.

A designer with a senseof humour. Great!

Peter
An unidentified coin is a piece of metal. An identified coin is a piece of history.

<k>

#2
Falkland 50p design was by Robert Elderton.jpg


For many years I believed - wrongly - that William Gardner had designed the Falkland fox on the reverse of the Falkland Islands' 50 pence coin. In 2016 I found evidence that Robert Elderton had in fact designed it. That would explain why Mr Gardner's initials did not appear on the coin, as they did on the earlier circulation coins - in fact, there are no initials at all on the 50 pence.

I always knew that Robert Elderton designed the reverse of the subsequent 20 pence coin, which featured a Falkland sheep and was first issued in 1982. Until now I have now been able to find my evidence for the 50 pence design, but I post it below. It is a screenshot from a scan of an old Royal Mint document that I downloaded from the UK National Archives web site. Unfortunately, because I was hurriedly downloading and reading dozens of such documents at the time, I did not note the name of the document from which it came, nor the date, so it could refer either to 1979 or 1980. Evidently it is an excerpt from some internal Royal Mint memo.
Visit the website of The Royal Mint Museum.

See: The Royal Mint Museum.