20 Dollars Starry Night

Palau has issued legal tender commemoratives under licensing arrangements with foreign designers and distributors since the 1990s, a practice that has little to do with Palauan monetary history and everything to do with the global collector market for high-relief and colored silver rounds dressed as coins. This piece invokes Van Gogh's 1889 painting, executed while he was a voluntary patient at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence — a fact the secondary market tends to romanticize far more than the painter himself did.