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.
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.