1/2 Thaler Gold pattern strike

Basel struck this gold pattern in 1741 as a presentation piece, not for circulation — the city's monetary authority occasionally commissioned such rarities to demonstrate technical capability and to serve diplomatic or ceremonial functions. The half thaler denomination in gold is a deliberate contradiction: a silver coin's face value rendered in a metal that made the object worth multiples of its stated worth, which was precisely the point for a gift intended to impress.

The references to both Winter and Divo/Tobler place this firmly within the documented Swiss pattern tradition, where canton and city mints produced gold strikings of silver types in very limited numbers. Survivors appear almost exclusively in institutional collections.