As Remembrance Day falls, it is worth recalling the Imperial War Museum’s remarkable display of Victoria Crosses. The field of campaign medal collecting can serve as a poignant reminder of those who have fallen, the qualities they had and the reasons they were prepared to give their lives in the service of their country.
Every medal counts, but of course it is usually those most rarely awarded – the VCs, MCs, GCs, DFCs, DFMs and CGMs among them – that carry the most extraordinary tales. And that’s what it’s all about in the end.
Materially, the medals themselves are little more than fairly inexpensive metal held up by a bit of ribbon, but what they stand for is what counts as they provide a physical link to these exceptional characters of the past, much in the way that religious relics have done for so much longer.
This explains why this field of collecting has grown hugely over the past 20 years or so, with prices at auction surging to several hundreds of thousands of pounds for the most sought-after VCs, and private sales rising to well over £1m.
The need to feel the touch of greatness was well illustrated a few years ago when the remains of a grasshopper were discovered trapped in the paint of Vincent Van Gogh’s 1889 picture Olive Trees.
Rather like those gorgeous pieces of amber you occasionally see at auction, which trapped unrecognisable insects sometimes hundreds of millions of years ago as tree sap before fossilising, the discovery created a seemingly direct link to a specific moment in time, almost 130 years on, compressing the years in between so that you could almost see and hear Vincent slapping the paint onto the canvas. This grasshopper was there when he did it.
These direct connections are what many people look for when buying things at auction and explain the huge price differences between artworks described in the catalogue as ‘follower of’ (someone unidentified working in the style of a well-known artist at around the same time), ‘school of’ (a work of the time in the style of the artist), ‘studio of’ (a work from the artist’s studio or closely associated with them), ‘attributed to’ (probably, but not certainly, by the artist) and ‘autograph work’ (categorically by the artist).
In the art world, there is nothing quite like being close enough to touch the hand of the creator.
