"1652" Shilling Good Samaritan Wyatt Copy MS(PCGS#534630)
"1652" Shilling Good Samaritan Wyatt Copy MS (PCGS#534630)
Spring 2025 Showcase Auction U.S. Coins
- 拍卖行
- Stack's Bowers
- 批号
- 2034
- 等级
- MS61
- 价格
- 13,230
- 详细说明
- Coin alignment, with the reverse rotated a few degrees counterclockwise. Silver-gray surfaces with a tinge of pale gold, the borders are into the peripheral lettering at lower left obverse, upper right reverse, although the entire design is appreciable on both sides. Glossy in texture with light hairlining to explain the MS-61 grade from PCGS. This is the most famous of all struck copies, itself a copy of a concoction that never existed in 17th century Massachusetts. Its story was elegantly unfolded by Eric P. Newman in his monograph <em>The Secret of the Good Samaritan Shilling</em>, mandatory reading for any enthusiast of colonial coins and related issues. Like the other issues created by Thomas Wyatt, his inspiration and source appears to have been Joseph Felt's <em>Historical Account of Massachusetts Currency</em>, knowing nothing about the mother of all Good Samaritan pieces in the British Museum or the Bushnell concoction (later sold in our Ford XIV sale for $46,000). It is known that Edwin Bishop acquired Wyatt's dies and produced some number of pieces from them after 1856; it is tempting to attribute this early die state example as a Wyatt striking, but there simply isn't enough data to do so. This is a cornerstone type in any collection of struck copies.