2007 Ireland & Croatia 2 Coin Ivan Mestrovic Silver Proof Set
Ivan Meštroviæ was a sculptor, an architect, a writer and a participant in important political events of his day. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Art in the early nineteen hundreds at the height of the Vienna Secession movement. He was awarded the grand prix for sculpture at the 1911 World Exhibition in Rome. And from 1923 to 1942, Meštroviæ was Dean of the Zagreb Academy of Arts.
The Committee, set up in 1926, and chaired by the Irish poet and Nobel
Prize winner, William Butler Yeats, to recommend designs for the coinage
of the new Irish State, invited Ivan Meštroviæ, the internationally
renowned artist to put forward his designs for the Irish coinage, using the harp and animal theme. As a result of
communication problems, via the postal system, his designs were not included in the committee's selection process.
Nevertheless, W.B. Yeats called his late design "one magnificent design". Thomas
Bodkin, at that time a Governor of the Irish National Gallery, described
it as "a superb design". The official Report of the Committee referred
to it as "a magnificent piece of work" and recommended to the
Government that an alternative use for it be found. Over the years,
many possibilities were examined. And for more than forty years, it has
been the design on the seal of the Central Bank of Ireland. The end
result is this 2 coin Silver Proof Set, issued jointly by Croatia and Ireland in 2007, fully validating the design's good reception
in 1927 and validating the excellence of Ivan
Mestrovic’s art, some eighty years after its submittal.

