Edward Everett Burr

Edward Everett Burr made his living drawing cars. In the late 1920s, working in Chicago's advertising trade, he sketched the gleaming automobiles in magazine ads and even modeled the figural radiator caps that crowned Cadillacs and LaSalles. That is an unusual résumé for someone whose name now sits on a U.S. coin.

He was born in Warren County, Ohio, on January 18, 1895, and came to Arkansas as a boy when his father, later a Methodist minister, moved the family to Paragould around 1905. Arkansas claimed him as one of its own — which is partly why, decades later, the job of designing the state's centennial coin came his way.

In the 1920s Burr studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, training under the society portraitist Leopold Seyffert and the academic sculptor Albin Polasek. He stayed in Chicago for most of his career, splitting his time between paying commercial work — advertising art, architectural renderings — and the fine-art exhibitions where his paintings and sculpture earned prizes. He was, in short, a working artist of his era: equal parts craftsman and gallery man.

Burr's one brush with American coinage was also his hardest. In 1933 Arkansas planned a half dollar for its 1936 centennial, and Burr won the design competition. Winning turned out to be the easy part.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts — the panel that vets the look of federal coins and monuments — rejected his sketch on July 27, 1934, calling it unsuitable. Burr did not simply walk away. With Arkansas senator Hattie Caraway pressing his case, the commission agreed that September to let him keep working, on the condition that he rework the portraits — pulling them from a flat, frontal view into the overlapping profiles you see on the coin today. Final approval came in March 1935, more than a year and a half after the contest closed.

The design splits a century into two faces. One side carries portraits: a Native American chief dated 1836, the year Arkansas entered the Union, paired with a modern woman in a Phrygian liberty cap dated 1936. The other side is dominated by an outstretched eagle over a rayed sun, with the Arkansas flag's diamond and stars worked into the field. (References disagree on which side is the "obverse" — the heads side — because the portraits sit opposite the denomination; it is one of the design's quirks.) Burr drew the design; a second Arkansas artist, Emily Bates, sculpted the finished plaster models the Mint worked from, in the Chicago studio of the noted sculptor Lorado Taft.

The eagle side outlived its first use. When a second coin was struck in 1937 to honor Senator Joseph T. Robinson, it kept Burr's reverse and simply swapped in a new portrait — making Burr's eagle the common thread between two distinct commemorative half dollars.