Coins have purpose and functionality. And their look is very much part of that.
Like a flag, a war banner, a crown or a palace they’ve always been part of the machinery of state.
So, states tend to do their best with the design.
The Victorian Young Head portrait by William Wyon, one of the greatest coin portraits of all time.
Personal taste is personal, so you will have your favourites - and we’re happy to hear about them.
And coins tend to occupy a particular aesthetic area - they favour national symbols (which is not to everyone’s taste), have their own portraiture style and geometry.
Artists have to work within a very small space, and with the numerous technical limitations that come with working in metal for mass production at enormous scale.
So, where a work of art has been committed to a small metal disc it is the result of ingenuity and great skill. .
So, with that in mind here are … coins that we think shine more than they need to.
The Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle, USA from 1907
The Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle of 1933. You might like the look of it, but you can't have it - it's too rare and too expensive.
This coin features on a lot of lists.
And deservedly so. It is extremely rare, extremely valuable, and, we think, extremely beautiful.
That’s a fairly commonly held view.
Double eagles are $20 face-value coins and a flagship issue for the US mint. They have to look good.
Saint-Gaudens (1848 - 1907) was Irish born, with Irish-French heritage. He was a well-known sculptor whose work can still be seen around America’s cities and beyond - the Abraham Lincoln statue in Parliament Square in London is a recast from his original.
Although the coins are very largely his work, he died before his designs - which had been technically difficult to reproduce - were cleared for production. The height of the relief was lowered and, post release, the “In God We Trust” motto was added at the insistence of Congress.
Saint-Gaudens was talented and knew his value. He’d once told the US mint’s director he was the only man in the US who could produce work good enough for the country’s coins.
But, he didn’t get on with the authorities at the mint and after one run-in too many with them had to be persuaded to design for them again by his personal friend, President Theodore Roosevelt.
The result was the 1907 Double Eagle.
Unfortunately, there was something of a mix up. The President liked high-relief designs inspired by Classical Greece and Rome. The director of the mint thought they were impractical and wanted Arabic numerals on the coins.
Saint-Gaudens went with the President’s approved ideas, and produced a coin that couldn’t be struck properly.
And he died before it could be sorted out.
The wrangling went on for some time after and the process helped to turn the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle from a high-value, rare and beautiful coin into one with some anomalies that are now among the most valuable coins in history.
History intervened too. The Great Depression ended the issue of US gold coins, and millions of the last issue of the coin were melted down.
The prize of all prizes is a 1933 double eagle that sold for $18.9 million in 2021. It’s complicated and legally hazy history meant a special certificate was issued to “monetize” the withdrawn coin so that it could be auctioned.
Perhaps Saint-Gaudens would have enjoyed the fuss his design was still making a century after all that work.
10 Louis d’Or of 1640, France
The 10 Louis d'or, like so many of these coins a vital piece of state building. Image Marie-Lan Nguyen @ Wikimedia Commons.
Power is behind a lot of money.
One of the fundamental powers of the modern state is the control of - and acceptance of that control - over money.
Louis XIII, one of the architects of the French state - with his great minister Carinal Richelieu - that became the greatest power in Europe, knew that, and in 1640 he created the coin we now know as the Louis d’or.
The name was to persist long after Louis’ reign (though fortunately his heirs repeated his name, until the 16th of that number was guillotined to give birth to a new republican rule).
Cardinal Richelieu helped Louis to forge a strong, powerful state, and money played a big part of that.
The new coins of 1640 were smart and machine made, and Jean Varin’s bust of Louis XIII is regarded as a masterwork.
For the 10 Louis denomination an exceptionally large coin of 4.5 cm was made and packed with high-purity gold. Weighing 67 grams, it was never circulated but was minted and was a plaything in the famously opulent French court.
Highly beautiful and incredibly rare, these coins go for hundreds of thousands of pounds when they turn up.
£5 gold “Una and the Lion”, 1839, UK.
William Wyon's Una and the Lion carried what may have been a visual introduction to the new queen.
While you might say, “well, they would say that” to the Royal Mint’s assertion that this coin is “arguably one of the most beautiful coins in the world”
But it’s more generally accepted.
If you spend any time around British coin and stamp collecting, you soon encounter William Wyon.
He engraved the famous portrait of Queen Victoria on this coin that was issued for the start of her reign. It’s called the Young Head, and Queen Victoria liked it so much that it remained on her coinage well beyond her youth - until 1887 in fact.
Another Wyon portrait was used on the most famous stamp in history, the Penny Black.
William Wyon's portrait on the Penny Black, one of many in our Penny Black Collection.
On this coin, it backs a beautifully engraved image of Victoria, fresh on the throne directing a lion, which, I guess is you, the British people!
The picture is a representation of Lady Una, a character in The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, and it was a bold choice to show the new monarch as a character from a 16th-century poem.
The coins were issued in a limited number and may have been a collector’s special edition (not such a modern thing as you may think).
One will be auctioned next week and is expected to make $300,000. Another example was sold recently for £400,000.
Petition crown, UK, private issue 1663
The design for the Petition Crown. History judges it as supremely successful, but it didn't achieve what its maker wanted.
You can now call the Petition Crown a “million-dollar coin” but its birth was one of disappointment and it was a sort of job application. That failed.
You’ll see that the date is close to the dates that the Louis d’or came out, and this is an important factor in the story.
Like William Wyon, Thomas Simon, who made this coin, is a legend among British coin collectors.
As a returning - and sometimes vengeful - monarch, Charles' image was very important to him.
Simon was upset that the first machine-made British coins had been designed by his rivals, the Roettiers brothers.
So, he put all his coining skill into this coin, which contains a literal petition around its rim: “THOMAS SIMON MOST HVMBLY PRAYS YOVR MAJESTY TO COMPARE THIS HIS TRYALL PIECE WITH THE DVTCH AND IF MORE TRVLY DRAWN & EMBOSS'D MORE GRACE; FVLLY ORDER'D AND MORE ACCURATELY ENGRAVEN TO RELEIVE HIM.”
Everyone loves this coin, particularly the remarkable portrait of King Charles II.
The reverse, an assembly of national shields, is also beautifully put together.
Simon’s big gesture failed.
But, because he made a small number of them and they were so beautiful, they were collector’s items very soon after their issue.
In 2024 extra fees put the price for an excellent condition example over that fabled $1 million mark.
Oban 10 ryo coins, Japan, from 1601
A 10 ryo Oban coin with characteristic inked message.
These coins are perhaps unusual to western eyes, but as important in Japanese state-building as any of the other coins here were in their nations.
The koban was the foundational issue of the Tokugawa coinage created by Tokugawa Ieyasu whose system lated until the 1860s.
They were cast rather than struck, which gives us this interesting shape and texture. The koban was worth one ryo, and was based on an older payment system based on a year’s supply of rice and was introduced largely to deal with Portuguese traders who didn’t want to be paid in grains.
Tokugawa coinage was established in 1601 and helped to stabilize a coinage system that was prey to lots of local issues and questionable quality.
Winning the Battle of Sekigahara helped Tokugawa establish a more stable Japanese system, including better regulated currency.
The Oban was the biggest issued coin and was generally used only for official and special purposes.
It is now collectible and valuable, and koban coins persist in Japanese culture as lucky charms that are sometimes sold to tourists at Shinto shrines.
The current highest fee for an Oban is just short of $1,920,000 for one that just predates the Tokugawa period.
The system was ended in 1868 by Japan’s dramatic and violent imperial restoration. It was replaced with a European-inspired system as Japan sought to open itself to world trade.
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