While the American Eagle coins are primarily valued for their gold content, it’s worth looking at their artistic content as well. They were selected as the US Mint’s primary coinage to offer investors looking to purchase gold bullion coins almost entirely based on its aesthetic qualities.
The coin’s design was created by Augustus Saint Gaudens, who was considered to be amongst the most important and influential western artists, if not perhaps the most influential American artist in history. To look at the history of art in America you will see a distinct change between art created prior to St. Gaudens’ career and the artwork created afterward. St. Gaudens placed importance on realism, while at the same time allowing for these realistic sketches, sculptures and paintings to also portray an idealized sense of realism. Prior to St. Gaudens, American art tended to follow along the same lines as much European art of the time, which had been illustrative and with a sense of clarity but with very little in the way of either realism or aesthetic ambition.
While the Canadian and South African coins are quite valuable, worth their own respective metal contents, the American Eagle coins are prized not only as investor’s items but as works of art.
It could even be said that you cannot become involved in American Eagle coins investing without also becoming something of an art connoisseur. You can of course American Eagle coins only for your investments and completely ignore the imagery on the obverse and reverse sides, but inspecting that artwork is in fact a big part of identifying coins as authentic and you can’t identify the coin as authentic without some degree of knowledge regarding the art itself. Likewise, this goes for knowing the history behind the coins you collect.
Of course, as wonderful as all this art and history is the fact remains that the main draw of the coins is of course the fact that they’re just a smart investment, plain and simple. Mainly that they allow the investor to buy and sell their metals in smaller increments. In that you can obtain these coins in any size from a tenth of an ounce to a full ounce, you needn’t move thousands of dollars worth of gold around every time you want to dip into your gold investment for some cash on a rainy day, nor do you need to spend thousands whenever you want to add a little more to your investment. You can simply put a few hundred dollars at a time into you account when convenient and allow the money to grow.
Source by Arthur McGuire
American Eagle Coins - The World"s Most Popular Bullion Coins
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