NOBEL PRIZE GOLD MEDAL FOR LITERATURE

 

[Maeterlinck, Mauritius]
Gold diploma and Nobel Prize in Literature medal.
December 10, 1911 .

The only Belgian Nobel Prize for Literature.

Maeterlinck is the second French-speaking writer to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after Sully-Prudhomme in 1901. The only Belgian writer to have received the prize, he is one of sixteen French-speaking writers awarded the Nobel Prize, including Anatole France (1921), André Gide (1947), Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964, who refused the prize), Jean-Marie Le Clézio (2008), Patrick Modiano (2014) and, last year, Annie Ernaux. In 1911, he was preferred by the Swedish jury to other candidates with prestigious names, such as Henry James (!), George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Anatole France and Pierre Loti (R. Grutman, p. 7). Coincidentally, 1911 is also the year Marie Curie received her Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium.

Gold medal (206.98 gr, diameter 65 mm). Small bumps.
Medal designed by Swedish sculptor Erik Lindberg:

• on the obverse profile of Alfred Nobel with his dates of birth and death, dated 1902;
• on the reverse a poet seated under a laurel, writing under the gaze of the Muse, with the motto taken from the Aeneid "Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes" ("by inventing the arts, we embellish our life", Virgil, Aeneid , VI 663), and in a cartouche the name of the laureate and the year of obtaining the prize.

 

Painted and bound diploma (390 x 290 mm). Under midnight blue morocco shirt with mosaic decoration of red, ocher, yellow, green and brown morocco in a gilt frame, on the upper cover: scrolls, vegetable crown and royal crowns surrounding the initials "MM"; on the lower cover: volute and small rosettes surrounding a lyre with laurel branch ( G. Hedberg, Kungl. Hofeboke, Stockholm). On the inside, vellum with large decoration painted by Olle Hjortzberg: interlacing of branches and foliage on a starry sky background where birds with red and blue plumage nest, with the Swedish coat of arms and the motto of the Swedish Academy ("Snille och smack"); in the centre, a calligraphic text in brown and ocher ink, in Swedish, awarding the literature prize to Maeterlinck, with the autograph signatures of two academicians: the historian Harald Gabriel Hjärne and the writer Carl David af Wirsén, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (see below for the transcript).

The text inscribed in the central cartouches indicates that the Academy chose Maurice Maeterlinck at its meeting of November 27, 1911 because of the great diversity of his work, and particularly for his dramatic creations which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and a poetics of the ideal, provoking deep emotion in the reader through an aura of mystery.

To read the complete lot description, see:
Gold diploma and Nobel Prize in Literature medal. (https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2023/livres-et-manuscrits/medaille-en-or-et-diplome-de-prix-nobel-1911?locale=en)

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