7 Photograph of model
for Lavin vignette painting No. 42.
8 Photo-reduction of painting of Lavin
No. 42. 9 Berkshire Hathaway
specimen stock certificate with Lavin
No. 42, revignetted. 10 Lavin vignette
No. 48, engraved in 1976. It was used on
many securities.
8
7
with the discovery of Robert Lavin in 1962.
By the time of his last vignette painting in
the early 1980s, Bob Lavin had provided 55
new vignettes and a number of “specials”
(art done for one company). While Guy
engraved many Lavin vignettes, the two
shown here represent two vignette genres,
one depicting allegorical figures and the
other depicting working people.
Lavin No. 42 was engraved by Guy in
1973. This allegorical vignette is of considerable interest because of the art-imitating-life-imitating-art quality it offers. A
portfolio to the right of the figure contains
securities possibly modeled on some actual
stock certificates, namely AT&T (with a
portrait of Alexander Graham Bell), General Electric (with a Foringer vignette)
and Philips Petroleum (with its image of
Calliope). Shown in Figures 7, 8 and 9,
respectively, are the model Lavin posed
for the painting; the photo-reduction of
the painting; and a Berkshire Hathaway
stock certificate with the vignette, adjusted
to a circular shape.
The other Lavin vignette is No. 48,
showing four workers: a “suit,” a hardhat,
a female and a computer technician holding a tape reel (Figure 10). This vignette,
engraved in 1976, saw considerable use and
was one of the first general stock vignettes
to picture a black man. Lavin’s production
of vignette paintings of working people
introduced an alternative to a centurylong monopoly of allegoricals, which were
considered more timeless and therefore
less susceptible to becoming obsolete.
The working people vignettes were popular from the 1970s onward, and many of
Lavin’s later paintings were of this variety.
9
J
The first major bank note portrait assignment for Guy occurred in 1966, for the
Brazil 10,000 Cruzeiros note (Figure 11). His
excellent engraving of Santos Dumont was
a very good beginning for Guy in the most
challenging part of the picture-engraving
field. One of the traditional advantages
36 Financial History | Spring/Summer 2011 | www.MoAF.org
of a picture engraver’s job at American
Bank Note (compared with the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing) in the 20th century
was that the work was more varied — bank
note vignettes and portraits, stock and bond
vignettes and portraits, stamp vignettes
and portraits, and miscellaneous picture