When money is just an illusion

A POINT OF VIEW

A penny or a pound - which is more valuable? It depends what you see when you look at money, says Simon Schama.

It could be the debate about the economy that's making me think of money lately, or it could be that in my local constituency two of the candidates are called Cash and Buck.

I have been remembering when I first grasped the true value of money. I was eight. My father, in one of his rare flush periods, put into my little paw a penny coin. But this one didn't have the face of the new queen on it. In fact it was hard to make out a face at all. Within the sliver-thin disc, worn smooth and shiny by great age, was a left-facing silhouette profile of a lighter shade of copper, raised just slightly from its dark base. I could make out a naked neck, a beaky bird-like nose, and tall brow from which hair had been swept back and tied in a ribboned bun.

A "bun" penny from Victoria's reign

It was the image of the young Queen Victoria, Dei Gratia, and the date stamped on the penny was 1859.

I had no idea how much the coin was worth. For me the value of the piece of metal was entirely historical. With the coin under my pillow I concocted a long chain of possession through which the penny had passed. Hard, bright and reddish in its infancy, it had perhaps been handed by a bank cashier to a father like my own, who then gave it as pocket money to his son who took it right away to the sweetshop owner for a bag of pear drops, so into the till it went until the shopkeeper needed some change, so he could buy a pie from a street stall, but the vendor had a grown-up boy who was going to the wars, and so early next morning he tucked the coin into his lad's pocket for luck before the Tommy went off to fall on a foreign field - alas for King and Country where his things were picked up by a kindly nurse who...

Well you get the idea. The penny travelled through time and place, darkening, beaten thin on the anvil of history until, as a slightly bent and frail thing almost 100 years old, it reached me and my hyperactive imagination daydreaming between the bladderwort and the rock pools on the muddy Essex shore.

I am, you may be disappointed to hear, no numismatist. I can barely say the word. But coins, for me, have always had this romantically augmented richness. I grieved bitterly in 1972 when the pound became something constituted from 100 boring pence.

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I had always liked the mere fact of a ha'penny; the sweetly poetic touch of putting the jenny wren - the smallest British bird - on the smallest coin, the humble farthing. I especially loved the threepenny bit for its dodecagonal - 12-sided - weirdness, its brass and nickel sallow yellow gleam and the crowned portcullis on its back.

I loved their nicknames. The long gone Victorian fourpenny piece had been known as a "joey"; our "tanners" - sixpence - seemed a chirpy thing, the right size for a small shot of merriment like sticking it deep in the depths of a Christmas pudding. The "half a dollar" (two and six) was a heavy chunk of change that would get you into the morning picture at the Lido or the Regal to see perhaps a pirate movie featuring wicked old salts who would bite down hard on a doubloon or a piece of eight to test its golden core.

One of my friends, who had seen too many of these films, tried this on a florin - a two-shilling coin - boasting that only the bite test would decide whether the coins were truly silver. Two unforgettable sounds followed this stunt: the crunch of tooth on alloy, and then that of a small boy in surprised pain as he picked bits of broken canine from his tongue.

Paper money

The thing about coins is their seeming defiance of monetary transience. Even when no longer legal tender, their reassuringly jingling durability remains.

When a pound was still paper

Along with that first Victorian penny, I have another of the old Victoria in her widows weeds, and one of the benignly domed and whiskery profile of Edward VII facing away from the mother with whom he had been so embattled. When the pound became coin rather than paper, it seemed, despite exchange rates, to be more not less substantial.

It's all in the mind, I know, but not just in my mind. Ever since paper currencies were invented - not to mention stock certificates and bonds, junky or otherwise - lightness and perishability have been constant themes of monetary moralists, and all the promising by central banks and treasuries printed on the notes to "pay the bearer" has made no difference to those anxieties and suspicions.

Paper catches the wind and away it goes like dandelion fluff. The Dutch liked to call speculations based on delusory assets (sound familiar?) "wind-handel" - trading in air. Popular prints around the time of the South Sea Bubble - another shimmering thing that would float off into thin air and pop - show worthless paper flying away, or else used to wipe the behinds of punters, for the equation of money with ordure was another constant theme of this kind of commentary.

Chaos of the South Sea Bubble

The Dutch were also the first international marketers of tobacco, so this symbolic gallery of ephemeral fortune was completed, inevitably, by representations of pipe dreams.

It's not surprising, then, to find in American still life pictures devoted to the fate of the stock market tobacco brands like Lucky Strike or Old Gold, whose very names seem to comment ironically on the propensity of investments to go up in smoke.

One of those painters, Otis Kaye, made just such a picture in the depths of the Depression in 1937 in which he put together other emblems of fugitive fortune - a set of dice, a broken pane of glass and a hanging fob watch - as part of a visual sermon on the evils of market capitalism. Kaye knew his subject alright. He had invested his family fortune - about $150,000 dollars - in the stock market and watched it evaporate in the crash.

Another picture of his is Washout, in which an illusionistic washing line seems suspended from the surface of the painting, to which are clipped a scorched $20 bill and a ticket stub reading "Tower Food Shelter. Admit One". All that kept Kaye himself from famished street life was his ability to sell pictures like this for a few bucks worth of dinner.

Illusionist skill was used to comment on the illusion of prosperity. Sometimes, most ingeniously, that illusion was the look - and even feel - of paper money itself. A generation before Otis Kaye, in the late 19th Century, another period of repeated booms and busts, and at a time when greenbacks were being pumped out of the Treasury, a group of artists in the eastern cities from Philadelphia to New York and New Haven, took to making uncannily exact images of paper money itself. Sometimes pristine, more often tattered and torn.

An illusion of money

The money paintings were usually shown as a novelty in bars and saloons - often beside actual bills pinned to felt boards - and the painters got themselves a small helping of brief local fame and a steady supply of beer in return. One, William Michael Harnett, was so good that he attracted the attention of the Secret Service that had been founded in 1865 expressly to hunt down counterfeiters.

In 1886, despite attempts to tell the officers that what they were looking at was art not forgery, Harnett was thrown in the slammer and only released by a judge on condition he desisted from the dangerous art of making or faking pictured money. Poor Harnett - and he never did get rich - obeyed and you can guess the end of the story - that his money paintings now go for hundreds of thousands of dollars and more.

Is it too much then to expect our present sorry plight to produce an art in which cleverness is laced with anger; an art that comments on money rather than just rakes it in?

After all, the aftermath of the credit crunch is littered with perfect material - all the paper from all those dodgy deals. Right - I want all you budding Kayes and Harnetts out there to go to your easels and sketchpads and do me a dazzling study in worthlessness.

Of course it might end up being a bit, er, derivative. But, never mind, you can still take the credit.