19th C. English Lead Billy and Charley Figure - Spiked Crown

Western Europe, England, London, Billy and Charley type. A crowned figure cast in lead faces the world twice over, once on either side, and not quite the same way twice. Eleven blunt spikes flare from a head the size of a thumbprint, the shoulders spread into stiff little wings, and the lower body closes in a soft shield. Both faces carry a banded orphrey down the centre, flanked by panels of stars and a narrow collar of repeated marks at the throat, ornament or lettering according to the charity of the reader. The features are drawn in a few shallow strokes: arched brows, lidded eyes, a straight nose, a small shut mouth conceding nothing. Yet the two halves differ in their particulars, the collar counted out differently, the stars falling in other rows, so the maker cut each side of his mould freehand, from memory, rather than copying one from the other. This piece belongs to the class of Victorian pseudo-medieval lead antiquities known as "Billy and Charley," or the Shadwell forgeries, after William Smith and Charles Eaton, two illiterate mudlarks who worked the London riverside in the late 1850s. Unable to read the "medieval" inscriptions they invented, the pair cast hundreds of lead pilgrim badges, medallions, and figures in an idiom entirely their own, dense with spiked crowns, staring frontal faces, star fields, and pseudo-lettering that resolves into nothing. Sold as genuine finds from the Shadwell foreshore, the objects fooled some collectors and antiquaries for a time before their fraudulence was exposed. The scandal only enriched their afterlife: authentic Billy and Charleys are now collected in their own right as folk-art curiosities of Victorian London. Because the two sides of this figure were modelled independently rather than mechanically copied, the object preserves two separate acts of invention, keeping more of its author's hand than such things usually do. The composition and technique establish the Shadwell idiom rather than any specific workshop, though a Smith and Eaton origin is plausible. Item # 204067

Estimate:$200

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