Machin decimal design

As a numismatic artist Arnold Machin will be best remembered for his portrait of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II adopted for the decimal coinage.  But he was also involved in the search for designs for the reverses of the new coins, an exercise which began in the early 1960s.  While his work was not ultimately successful, some of his ideas were selected for further development as plaster models, an example of which is this elaborate treatment of a lion’s head and national flowers of the United Kingdom.