VOCABULARY TERM: CLICHÉ

1802 France - Napoleon - Societe d'Encouragement by Pierre-Joseph Tiolier - A Cliché. of the medal

Cliché One-sided medallic items made by placing two thin blanks between a pair of dies and striking in a press. Originally intended for the artist's cabinet, or for museums, clichés mounted side-by-side exhibit both sides of a medal at a glance. When properly made clichés will exhibit suction or ghosting on the two interface surfaces, often the strongest device or feature of the two sides – as an obverse portrait – will form the greatest ghosting evidence.

At first clichés appear the same as uniface medals, in that both have design on one side and are basically blank on the other. However clichés differ from uniface medals in how they are made; clichés always have two thin blanks struck simultaneously, uniface medals are struck with a single blank between two dies, one of which is a jack die or blank die.

Keying Clichés. Often when clichés of multiple struck medals are made, they will be "keyed" – to be able to join back together the two blanks exactly to be struck a second or subsequent time (an aid for positioning the two blanks in the medal press for each blow). Blanks are keyed by punching one blank with a letter or figure punch (a hand punch will do, usually at the corners of an imaginary triangle or square) on the interface surface; metal from the opposite blank flows into these punch cavities. This will serve as a key to properly position the mated blanks if they need to be placed in the press again or to identify die alignment.

Very thin uniface medals are often called clichés (albeit incorrectly). However, true clichés can always be distinguished by the ghosting – and the possible evidence of the keyed punch mark – on the interface surface. An early example of a cliché is a George III Laudatory Medal of 1770 mentioned in Brown (140).

The word is French and is pronounced klee-shay. Reportedly the word was named after the sound the press made in striking the two pieces at once.

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