Interesting find.
The engraver Marcel Rau produced the ‘miner with lamp’ design for the obverses of 20 and 50 centime coins as a representation of ‘industry’, which appeared alongside other denominations featuring a depiction of Ceres with a cornucopia representing agriculture and Mercury with a caduceus representing commerce. The lamp is actually a ‘Davy lamp’, invented in 1815 by Sir Humphry Davy for use in coal mines, to reduce the danger of explosions from methane and other flammable gases.
Rau’s engraving is often said to have been inspired by artworks of Constantin Meunier who was a personal friend of Rau and known for his artistic depictions of miners, factory workers, dockhands, ploughmen, and peasants. However it also has significant resemblances to a 1937 engraving by the French Artist Gustave Pierre used as a frontispiece illustration for a book about the Henses-Pommerœul mine. The artists’ model who sat for that portrait (Louis Delplancq) insisted that Rau’s engraving was inspired by Pierre’s work.
Raymond Glorie, one of Rau's nephews, contested that the man on the coin was actually modelled after a coal miner named Bouillon, whom Rau had supposedly met during his time at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and that it also drew inspiration from a 15th Century terracotta bust of Niccolò da Uzzano, probably produced by the Italian Renaissance artist Donatello.
