Edgar Z. Steever

Most coin designers are invisible. You hold their work for a lifetime and never learn who made it. Edgar Z. Steever was at peace with that — his son said he "was proud to have so much of his art find its way into people's pockets."

Steever was born in 1915 and grew up on Broad Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where his father served as city clerk. He went to Deerfield Academy, then to Yale, where he earned a master of fine arts in 1941 — and where he met the painter Emily Barringer, whom he married that same year. During World War II he set sculpting aside and worked at a Connecticut naval factory, where he helped develop a locking device for the war effort.

He joined the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 1964 and stayed for 38 years, retiring in 2002. As a staff sculptor-engraver — the in-house artists who model and cut the designs that become coins — he produced dies for roughly twenty commemorative coins and medals. He died in 2006, at 91.

A sculptor-engraver does two jobs at once. First the sculptor: building the design in clay or plaster at large scale, in shallow relief — the raised, three-dimensional surface a coin shows when you tilt it to the light. Then the engraver's discipline: shrinking that relief onto a coin-sized die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the design into blank metal. Steever did both, the way Mint engravers were trained to.

His most admired work is the obverse — the "heads" side — of the 1986 Statue of Liberty half dollar. It doesn't just show the statue. It shows her at work: Liberty in the foreground, welcoming an inbound steamer into New York harbor, the Manhattan skyline behind her, the whole scene lit as if at the turn of the last century. It is a small painting in metal, and it remains one of the warmest images in modern U.S. commemorative coinage.

Steever's range went well beyond U.S. coins. He designed the obverse of the 1992 White House dollar, struck dies for medals honoring figures from Frank Lloyd Wright and the Gershwins to Louis L'Amour and Elie Wiesel, and engraved the reverse of the Virginia state quarter. Earlier in his career he even designed coinage for Liberia, Nationalist China, and the Philippines. Away from the Mint, he was a working sculptor — among his pieces is a life-size bronze leopard, the Lafayette College mascot. In 1996 the American Numismatic Association gave him its Numismatic Art Award.

Two of Steever's commemorative designs are catalogued on colcur, both struck for the run-up to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta and the celebrations around them.

On the 1995 Olympic baseball half dollar, Steever designed the obverse: a single frozen instant of the game — a batter mid-swing, a catcher crouched, an umpire poised to make the call. The reverse, by T. James Ferrell, carries the Atlanta Games logo. It is a copper-nickel clad coin, struck at San Francisco.

On the 1997 Botanic Garden silver dollar, Steever's obverse shows the elegant conservatory facade of the United States Botanic Garden in Washington — the living museum of plants that Congress traces to 1820. William C. Cousins designed the reverse: a single rose, the national flower. The coin is 90% silver, struck at Philadelphia.