Carl L. Schmitz

Carl Ludwig Schmitz was born on September 9, 1900, in Metz — a city that was part of the German Empire then and lies in France today. He fell into sculpture early. By fourteen he was apprenticed to a sculptor, and he went on to spend six years at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, one of the great training grounds of European art.

In 1923 he sailed for the United States and never left. He took naturalization as an American citizen in 1933. The early years were unglamorous: he worked as a modeler in the terra-cotta factories of Perth Amboy, New Jersey — shaping clay for buildings — while studying at night at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York City.

What lifted him was the company he kept. Schmitz worked as an assistant to three of the most important sculptors of the age — Carl Milles, Paul Manship, and Carl Paul Jennewein — before opening his own studio in 1930. That apprenticeship under masters shows in his work: clean lines, calm figures, a sculptor's feel for how an image reads in relief.

Schmitz built his reputation in stone and bronze, not on coins. His public commissions cluster around 1930s Washington, D.C., where the federal government was raising grand new buildings and hiring sculptors to dress them. He carved reliefs for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and he is credited with figures on the west facade of the United States Capitol itself — about as visible a stage as American sculpture offers.

His peers took him seriously. He joined the National Sculpture Society in 1933, was elected a National Academician, and taught sculpture at the National Academy of Design in New York. His honors included a gold medal at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and the George D. Widener Memorial Medal for a relief titled Trade.

Against that career, the Delaware half dollar is a footnote — but it is the work that put his hand in millions of pockets. In 1936 the Delaware Swedish Tercentenary Commission ran an open competition to design a coin marking 300 years since Swedish settlers landed on the Delaware. Thirty-eight artists entered. The jury included John R. Sinnock — the U.S. Mint's own Chief Engraver, the man whose initials sit on the Roosevelt dime — and the noted sculptor Dr. Robert Tait McKenzie. They chose Schmitz, who took home a $500 prize and the commission.

His two sides tell the settlers' story plainly. The obverse — the "heads" side — shows Old Swedes Church in Wilmington, consecrated in 1699 and still standing, rendered with the tower it gained in 1802 and a burst of sunlight breaking through clouds above it. The reverse carries the Kalmar Nyckel, the Swedish ship that brought the first colonists across the Atlantic. Look to the right of that ship and you can find his signature in miniature: the initials CLS, struck into the metal. The coins were minted at Philadelphia in March 1937, though by law the obverse reads 1936.