Alois Börsch

He was born on 1 March 1855 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a small Swabian town that had made its living from precious metal for centuries. Goldsmithing was the local trade, and Börsch went into it the ordinary way — an apprenticeship in engraving, learned in a goldware works and at the town's engraving and chasing school. Nothing about that start suggests a career. It was a craft, and a modest one.

Then, in the early 1870s, he went to Munich and was taken on at the Royal Bavarian Mint as an engraver's assistant. He was in his late teens. He would still be there almost half a century later.

That is the shape of his life, and it is unusual enough to be worth pausing on. Most of the great medallists of the age moved — Paris, Rome, Berlin, private commissions, academies. Börsch stayed inside one building and kept sharpening himself there. He took drawing classes under Professor Ludwig von Löfftz and studied copper engraving under Professor Johann Leonhard Raab, both figures in Munich's art establishment. The apprentice engraver turned himself into an artist without ever leaving his job.

The mint recognised it slowly, in the way institutions do. In 1888 he was promoted to Münzmedailleur — mint medallist, the man responsible for the artistic dies rather than merely assisting with them. Thirty years after that, in 1918, he was named Royal Bavarian Mint and Court Medallist. The title arrived in the last year Bavaria had a court to be medallist to. Within months the monarchy was gone. He retired early in February 1920 in poor health and died in Munich on 10 April 1923, at 68.

Börsch was a die-cutter first: the person who carves the design, in reverse and in hard steel, into the punch that will stamp the metal. Everything about that job rewards restraint. A coin is struck millions of times, wears in pockets, and has to stay legible after fifty years of handling. Flourishes die first.

So his portraits are plain. Look at the obverse — the heads side — of any Bavarian mark piece of the imperial period and you get the same thing: a bare head in profile, no crown, no drapery, no heroics, the legend running clean around the rim. He gave King Otto a still, closed face. He gave Ludwig III the face of a heavy, elderly, unglamorous man, which is what Ludwig III was. There is no flattery in them. That refusal to prettify is the closest thing Börsch has to a signature style, and it is why his kings look like people rather than emblems.

There is one portrait of his that raises a question nobody has fully answered. Otto was King of Bavaria from 1886 to 1913, and for all 27 of those years he was confined at Fürstenried, mentally ill, seen by almost no one and taking no part in government. Börsch cut his face onto Bavaria's silver anyway, year after year, in a run of denominations that carried it into every pocket in the kingdom. He was almost certainly working from earlier images rather than from the man. It is a strange commission for a portraitist: a likeness of someone who could not sit, of a king in name only, that had to look calm and sane and regal enough to be money. Börsch's answer was to keep it quiet and unsentimental — which is probably the only answer that could have worked.

Consistency mattered more than it sounds, too. Because Börsch cut the portraits across the denominations — the 2, 3 and 5 Mark silver and the 20 Mark gold — a Bavarian's coins all agreed with each other about what the sovereign looked like. Collectors assembling a Bavarian run today are, in effect, assembling one artist's sustained study of the same few faces.

One thing his work is not: the eagle. The reverse — the tails side — of every German Empire mark coin above one mark carried a standard imperial eagle, set centrally for the whole Reich and shared by every state. Bavaria's contribution was the head on the front. When a catalogue lists Börsch as "engraver" of one of these coins, the credit that is genuinely his is the Bavarian obverse.

Coins were also only part of his output. Over roughly 45 years he designed and cut something in the order of 300 dies for medals as well as coins — including work where the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, one of the most important German sculptors of the era, made the design and Börsch cut the steel that turned it into a struck object. That is a particular kind of skill: translating another artist's modelling into a die without losing it. Part of his written estate is now held at the German Art Archive in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.