100 Korun Jan Kupecký

Jan Kupecký spent much of his career in exile — Vienna, Nuremberg, Rome — because his Protestant faith made return to Bohemia impossible under Habsburg rule. He died in Nuremberg in 1740, never having permanently resettled in the country that now claims him as its foremost Baroque portraitist. This coin was issued in the final months of communist Czechoslovakia, just weeks after the Velvet Revolution began dismantling the regime that had, with characteristic selectivity, rehabilitated certain pre-socialist cultural figures for commemorative purposes.