103702 | GREAT BRITAIN. "Kwai 50th Anniversary" silvered bronze Medal.

103702  |  GREAT BRITAIN. "Kwai 50th Anniversary" silvered bronze Medal. Issued 1991 (70mm, 226.26 g, 12h). By Ronald Searle for the British Art Medal Society, and struck by Fattorini.

 

Perspective view of a railway, with skeletons serving as the railroad ties; shoots of bamboo around, with snake to right; horizon at a distance, with rising sun in the sky // Kwai / 1942–1943 in two lines; coiled snake to left. Edge: A few marks as made, otherwise plain.

 

The Medal 20 (Spring 1992), p. 118; Attwood 78. As Made. Pale gray matte surfaces, with some darker antiquing around the devices. From an output of 100 pieces.

 

Ex Rev. John Watson Collection (Dix Noonan Webb, 6 Dec 2012), lot 1176.

 

The workup in the Spring 1992 issue of The Medal offers this about the artist and his BAMS medal: "The distinguished caricaturist and medallist Ronald Searle has added two more medals to those he has previously produced for BAMS. The Kwai 50th anniversary medal harks back to the artist's war-time experience as a prisoner-of-war working on the Thai-Burma railway. A number of drawings of the time record this period. Fifty years on, the artist returns to the theme. Of the medal, he writes: 'Whilst the subject-matter of both sides is intended to be sombre and sinister, on the front at least I have tried to retain a certain naivity of interpretation rather in the spirit of medieval Dance of Death imagery. The approximate anatomy that one encounters in so many gothic frescoes has been applied to the anonymous bodies that make the sleepers of the railway line. That way I hope to avoid some of the "horror" clichés that flourish all-over nowadays. This medal is a statement and not an indictment, and the Japanese are present only symbolically. The rising sun, the line of the horizon and the converging railway lines, make what could be—but isn't—an oriental character, dominating the bodies that lie within it. The jungle around them is indicated by bamboo and a snake. The snake symbol, repeated on the reverse, is slightly more elaborate than that on the front to contrast with the simplicity of the statement: Kwai 1942-1943'."

 

Upload: 19 October 2026.