Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Old Head coinage/archive1

The Old Head coinage were British coins struck and dated between 1893 and 1901, with a portrait by Thomas Brock of an aged Queen Victoria. It replaced the Jubilee coinage, struck since 1887, which had been widely criticised. In 1891, a committee was appointed to consider the matter, and recommended replacements. Some coins continued with their old reverse designs, with Benedetto Pistrucci's design for the sovereign extended to the half sovereign, and others gained new ones, created either by Brock or by Edward Poynter. The issue became the first to bear, as part of the monarch's royal titles, IND IMP, short for the Latin for Empress of India. The issue originally consisted only of gold and silver coins, but in 1895, the Brock head of Victoria was placed on the bronze coinage (the penny and its fractions) as well. They continued to be struck until the death of Victoria in 1901 caused a change of design for the obverse; beginning in 1902, the coinage bore the head of her successor, Edward VII.