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Medals

Reference:5265 Alexander Richard Rolleston Woods, 1914

Large bust in an open field, to left; behind the head is a small facing figure, a branch in one hand and a book in the other. ALEXANDER RICHARD ROLLESTON (below); WOODS. 1914 (above). /

A figure, arms crossed, floating within clouds, towards the sun and heaven; below, an open, barren landscape, with some signs of vegetation amongst rocks in the foreground.  MVTARE . VELTIMERE. SPERNO [= I scorn to change or to fear].

By Sydney Carline (incuse signature below bust: S.W. CARLINE).

Bronze, cast. 93 mm. 

 

 

Condition: Extremely fine and Scarce

Notes:

Sydney Carline (1888-1929), was a landscape and portrait painter, etcher and book illustrator, and a medallist. Born in London, he studied at the Slade School of Art and in Paris, where in 1912 he enrolled at the private academy run by the symbolist painter Percyval Tudor-Hart. Carline produced a relatively large number of medallic designs but completed only a few medals, the earliest of which is that of Alexander Richard Rolleston Woods (1895-1915), an early fatality of the First World War. Sydney Carline was an official War Artist but his connection with Rolleston Woods and the background to the making of this remarkable medal is not clear: while the portrait clearly echoes the work of the renaissance medallist Pisanello, the reverse represents amongst the earliest signs of abstraction on a medal in Britain. Futurist in design, it recalls the work of Paul Nash, who along with Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth were contemporaries of Carline at the Slade School of Art and in Paris. An example of the medal and another that Carline made two years later for the Battle of Jutland Bank (Attwood 21) are in the British Museum, but in electrotype form.

 

 

References:

Philip Attwood, Artistic Circles: The Medal in Britain 1880-1918 (British Museum Press, 1992), p. 62., No. 20.