Stack’s Bowers Galleries announces the auction of Part II of the famed L.E. Bruun Collection, the world’s finest private collection of Scandinavian coinage, which has been insured for 500 million Danish kroner (about US$72.5 million). The auction will be held March 13-16, 2025, at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, Switzerland.
Part II follows quickly on the heels of the inaugural auction of the L.E. Bruun Collection: A Corpus of Scandinavian Monetary History. Held on September 14, 2024, in Copenhagen, Part I realized a total of €14,820,900 (approximately $16.5 million), a record for a single numismatic auction in Scandinavia. Among the sale’s 286 Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish coins were many individual recording-setting prices, led by the unique in private hands Danish gold Noble of King Hans that sold for €1,200,000 (approximately $1.33 million), more than three times the previous world record for a Scandinavian coin.
Part II will offer a wider spectrum of Scandinavian numismatics, ranging from the Viking period through the 19th century, with a broader geographic reach as well. Augmenting the core Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish items will be an extensive and much-anticipated offering of coins from the Danish duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, an area that was long under Danish rule but was lost to Germany after the Second Schleswig War in 1864.
The second offering from the Bruun Collection will also present a greater diversity of price points, with an aggregate estimate of €5 to €7 million. The approximately 700 items to be sold next March in Zurich will range in value from €1,000 to many hundreds of thousands of euros, whereas most items in Bruun Part I sold for over €10,000 each.
Beginning in the late 19th century, Lars Emil Bruun, better known as L.E. Bruun, amassed his fortune from the sale and export of countless millions of tins of world-renowned Danish butter. He invested some of that fortune in real estate on the outskirts of Copenhagen, which saw a marked rise in value as the population of that city tripled from 1890 through 1920. These business successes allowed him to expand the modest coin collection he had begun as a boy in the 1850s into the world’s greatest private collection of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden’s coins, medals, and paper money. When the final coin from the Bruun Collection has been auctioned, this cabinet will stand as the most valuable collection of international coins ever to have been sold.
Bruun, who passed away on November 21, 1923, left behind not only an impressive estate but also an unusual destiny for his coin collection.
Having seen the destruction wreaked by World War I, and keenly aware that the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 had destroyed nearly the entirety of the Danish capital, L.E. Bruun formulated a unique and innovative will: his collection of over 20,000 coins, medals, tokens, and notes would be held as a reserve for the Royal Danish Coin and Medal Collection for 100 years after his death. If the Royal Collection was damaged or stolen during that century, the L.E. Bruun Collection would become a gift to the Danish state. However, if the Royal Collection remained intact, it would be sold at auction, with the proceeds benefitting Bruun’s direct descendants.
On November 21, 2023, that 100-year waiting period ran out, and with the Royal Danish Coin and Medal Collection intact, L.E. Bruun’s fantastic collection of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish numismatics became destined for the auction block, with Stack’s Bowers Galleries awarded the contract for this world-renowned collection.
The L.E. Bruun Collection will be sold in a series of live auctions over the next three to five years, along with a series of online-only auctions commencing in early 2025 that will feature more modestly valued coins. Please visit www.StacksBowers.com/the-L-E-Bruun-Collection for additional information. For catalog requests or inquiries about the L.E. Bruun auctions, contact Stack’s Bowers Galleries at +1 949.253.0916 (US) or +45.80 40 49 42 (Denmark) or email [email protected].
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