Sawhill Lot 1063 / Adams Lot 231 Recovered!
President John Quincy Adams’s Coins Return to President Madison’s University
The Madison Art Collection has successfully reacquired Lot 1063 from the Dr. John Sawhill Collection! This hemidrachm of Argos has a storied ownership, being part of the President John Quincy Adams and Descendants Collection and the BCD Collection, one of the largest ancient Greek collections ever formed.
Our coin is a hemidrachm of Argos in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. Issued between 85–50 BCE, this small coin shows the foreparts of a wolf on the obverse (mostly worn away), but on the reverse it has an array of symbols: “A” indicating the city of Argos, Greek letters for the magistrates who issued the coin, and the twin caps of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) below. This coin is somewhat rare with these symbols, with only one known example in CoinArchives.
Amazingly, the auction came with the collector’s tickets that enable us to trace the coin’s direct ownership from Sawhill’s purchase at the Adams sale in 1971, to BCD’s acquisition of Sawhill’s coin in 1979, and finally its “return home” to James Madison University. The full “paper trail” is described below.
We are grateful to Aaron Berk of Harlan J Berk Ltd. for representing our interests at the auction and for two supporting donors to ensure our acquisition was successful. Without these individuals, our coin could not have returned home.
Tracking Adams, Sawhill, and BCD
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The Massachusetts Historical Society received the collection of President John Quincy Adams and his descendants in 1914 but later sold the coins in 1971 through an auction by Stack’s [PDF].
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Sawhill was present at the 1971 sale and purchased Lot 231 containing two coins. He received the collector’s ticket shown below. We have Sawhill’s invoice and know he paid $32.50 [PDF]. This is the same value listed in the Prices Realized for the auction.
- After Sawhill’s passing, his collection was sold in 1979 by Stack’s [PDF]. Our coin was Lot 1063, and thankfully Stack’s retained the previous Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) listing, indicating the same pair of coins as MHS 231.
- BCD purchased the coin at the 1979 sale. We can determine this from the Sawhill auction clipping (“B” in the figure above) and his handwritten tag and unique Polaroids shown below. These tags and photos follow a well-known pattern, and the $70 purchase price indicated matches the Prices Realized from the 1979 Sawhill sale.
- BCD dispersed the major pieces of his collection over 10 sales starting in 1996. Minor or duplicate coins were later sold in various auctions. Our coin appeared in 2010 in a group of 82 coins as Lot 281 in CNG Triton XII. The unknown purchaser, whose coin we just acquired, created their own tags summarizing the provenance above.
Given the relatively sparse photography in the 1971 Adams Sale and the 1979 Sawhill Sale, it would have been impossible to recover this information without this important paper trail. If you wish to learn more about our work with the remaining Sawhill Collection, please check out our Projects Page.