100 Dollars - Charles III Utamaro

Kitagawa Utamaro's woodblock prints were the subject of one of the most aggressive acts of state censorship in Edo-period Japan: in 1804, the Tokugawa shogunate sentenced him to manacled imprisonment for fifty days after he produced a triptych depicting the regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi with his concubines — a politically intolerable subject. He died the following year, likely broken by the punishment. Cook Islands has made a cottage industry of large-format gold issues pairing fine-art subjects with the .9999 standard, and Utamaro's ōkubi-e compositions translate unusually well to the round field.