Exclusive! Parthava Coin joins the numismatic nature market with ‘Jaguar’, a striking first Night & Day coin

The big cats have dominated nature coins for quite some time, and there have been some quite stunning designs over the last few years, ranging from realistic depictions, to cultural imagery. Possibly the most powerful of them all has been the realistic portrait, and these are often the most difficult for a coin designer to get right. When you stare into an animal’s face, particularly a large mammal, you tend to notice flaws quite quickly.

It’s a pleasure to say that Parthava Coin’s first issue in their new ‘Day & Night’ series has no such problems. Eschewing the usual Lion and Tiger, they’ve chosen the third-biggest cat for their first portrayal, and the Jaguar is a wholly fascinating beast in its own right. Oozing power, their bite force is greater than either of the bigger cats, they’ve gained notoriety for hunting Caimans (an alligatorid), and even turtles. At 1500 psi, their bite makes short work of prey other predators can only dream of taking down. It’s also a quite beautiful animal.

The head-on portrait of the Jaguar on this coin is outstanding. Produced by CIT, it bears the hallmarks of their own Hunters by Night series, and employs their superb Smartminting. The latter imparts the coin with lashings of high-relief, which maintains all the detail you’d expect from a low-relief coin. It’s quite sublime how there now seems to be virtually no downsides to the high levels of relief we now enjoy. The portrait is beautiful, and the series signature of having it depicted half in daylight and half at night, is very well done.

Keeping the eyes the same was a great move, in our opinion, as it makes it clearer that this is a single individual, and not a mash-up of two different views. The transition line is nicely blurred, reflecting the furry nature of the subject perhaps, and far superior to a laser-straight line running down the middle. They could have taken it even further, as there appears to be a strong light source to the right, by having the shadow side follow the contours of the face a bit more, but we feel that might have looked a little odd, especially as the transition line sits on the facial apex. Parthava likely made the best choice, we think.

The obverse is fully obsidian black, and has a stylised sun filling most of it, in which there are phases of the moon, and the issue details for Palau. It’s all neat enough, although the clear focus here is obviously that stunning reverse. The coin has a mintage of 777 pieces, and will come boxed with a Certificate of Authenticity. A beautiful debut for the series, it will be cool to see what else they come up with for future issues. Maybe a Jumping Spider (eight eyes!), or a Saltwater Crocodile, or even something prehistoric. Who knows, but feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.

The coin is available from right now, it literally just went live, and is available exclusively from Parthava Coin, and from Rome-based Powercoin.