Spink Books have published a new book on William Wyon, whose image of Queen Victoria was the inspiration for the world’s first stamp, The Penny Black.
It is available to order direct from Spink. Click here.
A4, 746 pages, hardback jacketed, with over 1,000 illustrations in colour, £180
More people have seen William Wyon’s work than that of any other British artist. His coins were handled by hundreds of millions and his ‘Penny Black’ portrait of Queen Victoria (reproduced on the earliest postage stamp and its successors, from 1840 until her death in 1901) was printed in billions and circulated around the globe, becoming a google doodle on its 175th anniversary in 2015.
The maker of famously beautiful coins like the gold Una and the Lion £5 piece of 1839 and the Gothic Crown of 1847 Wyon was also the first artist to design regular campaign medals, including the Naval General service medal of 1847/8, the Army general service medal of 1847/8 the China medal of 1842/7 and the Jellalabad Medal of 1842/4. His commemorative medals, for a fascinating range of clients, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert whose favourite portraitist he was, provide a telling portrait of an energetic and self-confident period in British history. Yet today he is relatively unknown.
Mark Jones’s milestone catalogue gives the reader a fully comprehensive view of Wyon’s remarkable output, shining a new spotlight on one of Britain’s most unjustly neglected artists.
Sir Mark Jones was Curator of Medals at the British Museum for fifteen years before becoming Keeper of Coins and Medals in 1990. He went on to be Director of the National Museums of Scotland, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Master of St Cross College, Oxford. More recently, in 2023-24 he was interim Director of the British Museum.
He has written extensively on medals and on fakes and forgeries.