Description
With a mintage of just 600 sets, this four piece set of pure gold coins is highly collectible as well as being an attractive representation of Canada’s most recognized symbol, the Maple Leaf. The four coins have nominal face values of $50, $10, $5 and $1, with corresponding pure gold weights of 1, ¼ and 1/10 and 1/20 ounce. The image of all four coins features Canadian artist Claudio D’Angelo’s depiction of two overlapping sugar maple leaves on their stems. Rendered in lovely detail by Royal Canadian Mint engravers, the two stylized leaves bend gracefully on their long stems. The four coins appropriately come displayed in a Canadian maple wood case.
This is the second set in a series. The first set sold out quickly from the Mint, and the first 90% of the mintage for this set was sold almost immediately.
The leaves of the sugar maple have symbolized Canada and Canadians for nearly three hundred years. Traceable to a time when immigrants to Canada wore lapel pins to identify their homelands, the maple leaf soon took its place alongside the English rose, the Scottish thistle, the Irish shamrock, and the French fleur-de-lis as a symbol of pride for native-born Canadians.
Today, a representation of the sugar maple’s five-lobed leaf sits at the very centre of the country’s most important national marker: the Canadian flag. The idea of including the sugar maple leaf on Canada’s flag took root with Lester B. Pearson in World War I, when he noted that every Canadian battalion had included some form of the maple leaf in its insignia. Under his leadership as Prime Minister of Canada fifty years later, in 1964, Canada’s famous red-and-white maple leaf flag was born.
