Parisii Gold Stater circa 150-50 BC. Celtized head of Apollo right, with hair flowing in large locks. In front, large volute over club-like object, vertical lines below neck truncation / Horse galloping left, ornate "wing" above, rosette below. 7,30g. Blanchet 343; Colbert Class II, p. 9, 4; DT 79; LT 7782. An exceptional coin with great provenance. Extremely fine. Provenance: Bourgey (27-28 October 1913), 251. Sotheby's (7 March 1996), 11 (illustrated on front cover). Leu 79 (31 October 2000), 64. Celtic coins are of particular interest to our contemporaries. This has not always been the case. Imbued with academicism, numismatists of earlier centuries looked down upon these barbarous coins, preferring instead the rigor of classical art. It was not until the 20th century, with the emergence of modern art, that numismatists began to take a serious interest in these coins. Picasso and Braque expressed their admiration for Celtic art, seeing in it the testimony of an age when forms were still free. Freed from established conventions and apparently rejecting all rules, these Celtic coins seemed to derive solely from the imagination of their creators. The Parisii were established along the middle course of the Seine. Their principal oppidum was Lutetia (Paris). Their wealth, attested by a gold coinage of exceptional quality, derived from their control of river traffic. As one of Vercingetorix’s earliest allies, they supplied a contingent of 8,000 men to the Celtic coalition during the Gallic Wars. In 1848, A. Duchalais proposed attributing these magnificent staters to the Celtic people of Paris. Fifty years later, this attribution was finally accepted by E. Muret, A. Chabouillet and H. de la Tour in their Atlas des monnaies gauloises. The discovery and publication of the Puteaux hoard provided further evidence in support of these conclusions, allowing J.-P. Le Dantec, in the Mélanges Colbert de Beaulieu, to publish examples of Class II that were known at the time. This issue, of which only around thirty examples are known, is rightly regarded as the pinnacle of Celtic monetary art.