Hans Schuler

Hans Schuler arrived in Baltimore as a boy from Alsace-Lorraine, a borderland that passed back and forth between France and Germany. He left it covered in bronze.

Born in 1874, he trained at the Maryland Institute — the school we now call MICA — then crossed the Atlantic to study at the Académie Julian in Paris under the French sculptor Raoul Verlet. In 1901, at twenty-seven, he won the gold medal at the Paris Salon, the most prestigious art exhibition in the world. He was the first American sculptor ever to take it.

He could have stayed in Paris. Instead he came home. For the next fifty years he was, by common consent, "Baltimore's monument maker" — the man the city called when it wanted a hero cast in metal. From 1925 until his death in 1951 he also ran the Maryland Institute as its president, shaping a generation of artists for more than a quarter century. He died in Baltimore in 1951, at seventy-seven.

Schuler worked in the grand public tradition — the heroic figure, the memorial, the portrait in bronze meant to outlast everyone who remembered the man. Walk through Baltimore and you walk through his career: Johns Hopkins seated in bronze on the university campus, the poet Sidney Lanier nearby, Casimir Pulaski on horseback in Patterson Park, a Martin Luther monument by Lake Montebello. In Washington he carved the marble memorial to President James Buchanan in Meridian Hill Park.

So when Maryland needed someone to sculpt a coin for its 300th birthday, the choice was obvious. The state's most famous sculptor, a professor at its own art school, would design the 1934 Maryland Tercentenary half dollar.

Coin work asks a sculptor to think small and shallow. A monument can be twenty feet tall; a coin is the width of a thumbnail and barely a millimeter of relief — relief being how far the design rises off the flat surface. Schuler had to compress a portrait, a coat of arms, and a state motto into that tiny field. For the face of Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Baron Baltimore — the Catholic nobleman King Charles I granted the Maryland colony in 1632 — he didn't invent a likeness. He borrowed one, from a well-known 17th-century painting of Lord Baltimore by the artist Gerard Soest. His initials, a small HS, sit beside the M in MARYLAND on the reverse.

That borrowed portrait is where the story turns. The federal Commission of Fine Arts, which reviews U.S. coin designs, looked at Calvert's broad flat collar and objected: that collar looked Puritan, they said, not the lace-and-finery a Cavalier nobleman like Baltimore would have worn. Schuler refused to change it. The collar came straight from the Soest painting, he argued — it was history, not invention. He won. The coin went out exactly as he modeled it, collar and all. Collectors have been retelling the argument ever since.