This past September 25th, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston became the first major museum in the United States to offer a gallery dedicated to coins of ancient Greece and Rome. The "Michael C. Ruettgers Gallery for Ancient Coins" draws on the museum's collection of over 7,500 ancient coins, one of the largest in the world, installing about 500 coins in the new gallery.
The Art Institute of Chicago will reopen the "Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art" November 11, 2012.
Finally, after many months of hard work by John Burton's team at Echo Design Group, our new website ocnumis.com is now live. There is a lot of new inventory to add over the next couple of weeks, so be sure to keep in touch.
Tracing prior ownership of important coins is often just about following hunches in a brute force catalogue by catalogue search. And sometimes, it's just luck.
Dusting off my auction catalogue bookcases yesterday afternoon, just by chance, I pulled out the Bowers and Merena sale of June 10-11, 1985 featuring the collection of Hoke S. Greene. Staring at me from the covers were enlarged photos of a 1796 Draped Bust 25c that was curiously similar to the PCGS MS63 we sold at the F.U.N. show this past January. I've been casually looking for any prior record of this coin for the past eight years or so since I sold it for Jim Swan. A quick photo match confirmed that they are the same coin.
Sometimes, it is better to be lucky than good.