Culture Vulture Gallery Shop

11/10/2026

They Died. Their Hair Became Jewellery. Their Grief Became an Industry.
Imagine wearing your dead lover’s hair against your skin, carrying their painted eye close to your heart or commissioning a miniature portrait of yourself weeping beside their grave. For centuries, mourning was far more than an emotion. It was an art, a ritual, a declaration of love and, eventually, a thriving industry.
From Georgian rings engraved with the names of the dead to Victorian jewellery woven from human hair, exquisitely painted lover’s eyes and embroidered memorials that took months to complete, the British and Americans developed an extraordinary visual language of loss. Goldsmiths, miniature painters and needleworkers transformed bereavement into objects of astonishing beauty, sometimes intimate, sometimes extravagant and often deeply unsettling to modern eyes.
These were not simply fashionable accessories. They were physical connections to people who would never return, preserving their hair, their likeness and even the memory of their final moments.
Before photographs filled our homes and memories lived on screens, people wore their dead. And sometimes, the most beautiful things they owned were made from grief.

Locks of the dead woven into gold, lost loves sealed in lockets and grief transformed into some of history's most hauntingly beautiful treasures.

07/10/2026

Someone Buried This to Stop a Witch
People buried bottles filled with pins beneath their homes. They carried charms against witches, poison, disease, and the evil eye. They bought books promising access to spirits, stood trial because their neighbors believed they possessed supernatural powers, and eventually pointed cameras into the darkness hoping the dead might appear. From Dürer and Baldung’s terrifying witches to Goya’s savage satire, from the Pendle trials and Salem to spirit photographs of Mary Todd Lincoln supposedly accompanied by her murdered husband, the material history of magic is far stranger than the broomsticks and cauldrons we inherited from popular culture.
And people collect it.
But that is where things get complicated. A seventeenth century bottle is not automatically a witch bottle. An old book of spells is not proof that a witch owned it. A strange object found inside a wall is not necessarily magical simply because an auction catalogue says so. In a market where a good supernatural story can add considerably to the price, provenance matters more than mythology.
Because when someone tells you an object belonged to a witch, summoned a spirit, stopped a curse, or spent three hundred years hidden beneath a hearth, there is really only one sensible response:
Prove it.

Now People Collect It

04/10/2026

You’re Going To Die. Buy Something Nice.
Death used to be something you wore.
Long before memento mori became Halloween décor, collectors carried mortality on their fingers, around their necks, through their rosaries, inside their watches, and eventually onto the walls of their homes. A beautiful face turns into a skull. A miniature book opens to reveal death. Lovers share one side of a rosary bead while a death’s head waits on the other. Gold rings warn BE HOLD THE ENDE. Seventeenth century watches literally count down a life from inside a skull.
And then there are the paintings. Dutch vanitas artists surrounded skulls with everything worth wanting: books, coins, flowers, music, silver, watches, art, knowledge and luxury. The message was rather inconvenient for the collector wealthy enough to buy one. You can own all of this. You just can’t keep it.
By the eighteenth century, the reminder had become remembrance. American mourning rings preserved names, dates and even human hair beneath glass, transforming death from a universal warning into the memory of one particular person.
These objects were never simply macabre. They were intimate, expensive, beautifully made and meant to be handled, worn, displayed and contemplated. For today’s collector, that is precisely what makes them so compelling. They survive because somebody once paid to keep death close.
Memento mori. Remember you must die. Apparently, previous generations felt we needed reminding.

Skull Rings, Coffin Jewels, Death’s-Head Watches, And The Exquisite Art Of Collecting Mortality

02/10/2026

The Mermaid Was Fake. The Money Wasn’t.
From photographs hiding secrets on their backs to crocodiles on ceilings, fake mermaids, lying archives, coins, tokens, and the strange ways we decide what something is worth, the last three months proved one thing: objects are never just objects. The real story begins when you start asking questions.

Crocodiles, secret photographs, fake unicorns, lying archives, powerful coins, and three months proving nothing is quite what it seems.

01/10/2026

The Lion Is How They Get You
It starts innocently enough. You buy the Lion.
Then you discover the Queen had ten beasts guarding her ancestry, and suddenly you’re knee deep in dragons, unicorns, griffins, Plantagenets, Tudors, the Wars of the Roses and a completely imaginary creature called a yale.
The Royal Mint’s Queen’s Beasts collection is far more than ten very handsome coins. Inspired by the heraldic beasts created for Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation, the series packs centuries of royal marriages, rival claims, dynastic warfare and political survival into objects small enough to hold in your hand.
But the story does not begin with the modern collection. James III was putting a unicorn on Scottish gold in the fifteenth century. Henry VIII stared out from magnificent silver medals surrounded by the symbols of Tudor power. Elizabeth I turned the gold sovereign into a miniature declaration of royal authority. Charles I left behind the extraordinary Juxon Medal, where the object’s provenance is nearly as compelling as the gold itself.
Then Jody Clark brought the beasts roaring back.
And this is where collectors get into trouble.
Because once you know what the lions, dragons, falcons, bulls, greyhounds and shields actually mean, you’re no longer looking at ten modern coins. You’re looking at ten doorways into nearly a thousand years of British monarchy, heraldry and numismatic history.
You thought you were buying the Lion.
The Lion was merely the beginning.

Buy one coin and suddenly you’re hunting dragons, unicorns and a creature that never actually existed.

30/09/2026

What Was in Your Pocket When You Died?
What do a pierced coin, a lock of human hair, a saint worn smooth from touch, a lover’s name carved into silver and a lucky charm carried into war have in common? Someone once refused to leave home without them.What Was in Your Pocket When You Died? looks beyond mint marks, precious metals and pristine condition to the intimate objects people carried against their bodies because they meant something. From medieval signet rings and reliquaries to devotional medals, love tokens, mourning jewellery, touchpieces, talismans and identification objects, these are pieces transformed by faith, fear, love, grief and hope. For collectors, the scratch, piercing, inscription or worn surface is not always damage. Sometimes it is the most important part of the object. People disappear. The things they carried survive. And sometimes the smallest object is the one with the biggest story to tell.

Love, Luck, God, Grief and the Tiny Things We Refused to Leave Behind

29/09/2026

Seven fall exhibitions in London, from Robert Ryman's Barbican survey to Nan Goldin's Hayward debut, that are worth the trip.

27/09/2026

Your Coin Had a Life Before You
Your coin had a life before you, and the tiny scrap of paper tucked beneath it may hold more history than you realise. From Renaissance cabinets and royal collections to the British Museum, the Ashmolean, the Cabinet des Médailles and America’s great numismatic collections, we trace how private obsession became serious scholarship and ultimately built the foundations of the modern museum. Coins, medals and seals became more than beautiful objects. They became evidence. And for today’s collector, provenance, old tickets, forgotten catalogues and battered envelopes can reveal exactly where an object has been for centuries. So whatever you do, keep the ticket.

The Collectors, Lost Cabinets, and Hidden Provenances Behind the Metal

23/09/2026

The Bank Went Bust. The Paper Got More Valuable.
Money has always been a confidence trick. A coin at least gives you metal. Paper gives you a promise and asks you to believe it. From handwritten cheques and early Bank of England notes to elaborately engraved American currency, bonds, share certificates, lottery tickets and financial paper left behind by spectacularly failed companies, Signed, Sealed, and Worth Something follows the extraordinary moment when ink, signatures, seals and engraving became valuable enough to move fortunes. For collectors, the real fun often begins after the money stops being money. A cancelled bond, obsolete banknote or worthless share certificate can become far more desirable than its original face value, while signatures, printers, serial numbers, proofs, cancellations, provenance and even damage can completely transform an object’s significance. Sometimes the bank collapses. Sometimes the company disappears. Sometimes the promise becomes worthless. And sometimes the bloody piece of paper they left behind becomes the thing everyone wants.

Dead Money, Failed Fortunes and the Banknotes, Bonds and Shares Collectors Want

20/09/2026

Fake. Worthless. Illegal. Highly Collectable.
What happens when ordinary money stops working? People improvise.
From dodgy Georgian halfpennies and English Civil War siege money to German Notgeld, prisoner currency, occupation notes and hyperinflation bills covered in absurd strings of zeros, some of numismatics’ most fascinating objects were born when financial systems went spectacularly wrong.
For collectors, that is precisely the appeal. Yesterday’s counterfeit, worthless scrap or emergency issue can become today’s coveted rarity.
Because money only works whilst people agree it does.
And when that agreement collapses, things get wonderfully strange.

Counterfeits, Siege Money, Hyperinflation and the Extraordinary Currency Created When Everything Goes to Hell