The Royal Mint’s long-running numismatic celebration of Peter Rabbit continues in the characters 120th year

Peter Rabbit is 120 years old and for the seventh consecutive year, the Royal Mint is issuing coins celebrating the legendary children’s literary character. Royal Mint artist, Ffion Gwillim, is back doing the honours, and she’s produced a super looking design this year, a perfect homage to the original artwork. It must be difficult to produce something new when you’re constrained by a century of expectation and boundaries, but this is a perfectly excellent effort, leagues above the relatively disappointing 2021 release, with its unusual stylistic approach.

The central character art is an official piece that adorns the cover of a new anniversary edition of the original story that has just been published, but everything else, all that makes for a fine looking coin, is the mints work. As is usual for Royal Mint issues, only the effigy of Queen Elizabeth II, by Jody Clark, adorns the obverse.

Only the two precious metal variants make up this offering. The one-ounce 0.999 silver coin is coloured, in the original style, but the similarly sized 0.9999 gold version is cleanly struck. We’ve never been fans of colour on gold coins, finding it rarely improves the aesthetics, and that looks to be the case here, in our view. Both are pretty coins, easily our favourite of the many issues to date. Available today, the silver will sell for £100.00, and the gold for an odd £2,505.00. A base-metal variant is also available in two versions, one limited to 8,600 pieces and exclusively sold by the mint.

PRESS RELEASE

The Royal Mint has today revealed a brand-new commemorative coin marking 120 years since the first publication of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, developed in collaboration with Penguin Ventures. The Royal Mint’s own Ffion Gwillim created the design using original storybook illustrations, settling on an image showing Peter Rabbit surrounded by wildflowers, bees, and butterflies.

Speaking about the design, Ffion said, “As the coin is a celebration of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the coin to be cheerful and have a celebratory feel. I took inspiration from the colourful floral illustrations seen throughout the book.

“Taking the different floral elements from pages in the book to create a new scene on a round coin was a welcomed design challenge – applying colour to such a detailed coin also took a lot of care and precision.”

Recently, research from The Royal Mint revealed that more than half of 35–44-year-olds said that childhood character coins were the main reason for starting a collection (51%). The childhood character coins also inspired almost three quarters of Royal Mint’s collectors aged 18-24 (74%).

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter was first published in 1902 and since then the iconic rabbit in a blue jacket has gone on to win the hearts of millions of families around the world. The original Tale has sold over 46 million copies globally and has been published in 48 languages, including Braille and Hieroglyphics.