History of the Medallic Art Company

Sometime before 1908, Henri Weil met a successful real estate man in Manhattan by the name of Robert Hewitt, Jr.

Hewitt was a member of several numismatic and medallic societies here and abroad, and he proposed to Henri Weil that a medallic society be established in the United States. He gave it the name “Circle of Friends of the Medallion.”

Hewitt somehow convinced the Deitsch Brothers to finance the formation of the Circle of Friends of the Medallion. The charter membership included the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, J. Pierpont Morgan, Louis Tiffany, Henry Sherwin (of Sherwin-Williams paint fame), and others from the elite of New York society pages.

The first medallic issue of The Circle of Friends was the 1909 commemoration of Robert Fulton’s development of a successful steamboat and Henry Hudson’s nautical explorations around North America. These bore the Deitsch Brothers edgemark, but neither Robert Hewitt nor Henri Weil are mentioned anywhere in the accompanying literature.