Jim Sharpe

Jim Sharpe spent his career on the most public surface in America: the magazine cover. From the 1970s into the 1990s his realist paintings ran on the front of Time, Newsweek, and TV Guide — the kind of images millions of people walked past at the supermarket without ever learning the artist's name.

He worked out of Westport, Connecticut, a leafy commuter town that, improbably, became one of the great clusters of American commercial illustration in the postwar decades. Sharpe fit right in. He had started in advertising — designing and art-directing car campaigns, where he became known for montage, the technique of fusing several images into one composition. That instinct for packing a story into a single frame is exactly what a coin demands.

By the 1990s he was a staff artist for ABC News and its newsmagazine 20/20, sketching the stories television couldn't film. A longtime neighbor remembered him simply as "the great artist Jim Sharpe… and genuinely cool guy." He died in 2005.

Most people who design U.S. coins are sculptor-engravers on the Mint's own staff, trained to carve in relief — the raised, three-dimensional surface a coin is struck from. Sharpe came from the opposite world. He was a flat-surface man: a painter who thought in paint, light, and montage.

That gap is why his coin is a two-name job. Sharpe drew the obverse — the heads side — and a Mint sculptor, T. James Ferrell, translated his drawing into the carved steel die that actually stamps the metal. It is the same partnership behind much modern commemorative coinage: an outside artist supplies the vision, a Mint engraver makes it strikeable.

You can feel the illustrator's eye in the result. Instead of a static profile, Sharpe gave the 1992 Olympic gold piece a male sprinter caught mid-stride, bursting toward you in a "burst of speed," an American flag streaming behind him and the five Olympic rings overhead. It is a magazine cover compressed onto 21 millimeters of gold — motion, drama, a single hero filling the frame.

He had been doing exactly this for the government for years in another medium. Sharpe designed the U.S. Postal Service's long-running Performing Arts series, a run of commemorative stamps honoring figures of stage and screen that stretched across the late 1970s and 1980s — including the 1986 stamp for jazz great Duke Ellington. The Olympic coin was that same skill, now in gold.

The 1992-W $5 Olympic gold piece — a "half eagle" in old American money-speak — was struck to raise money for U.S. athletes heading to the Barcelona Games. Each coin carried a surcharge that funded their training.

It is a small, dense thing: about a quarter-ounce of gold (90% gold, the rest silver and copper), 21.59 mm across, struck at the West Point Mint (the "W" mint mark — the tiny letter showing which facility made it). Collectors could buy it two ways, and the numbers tell you which they preferred. The Mint struck 27,732 in the ordinary uncirculated finish and 77,313 as proofs — coins made with polished dies and specially prepared blanks for a mirror-bright, collector-grade surface. Far more people wanted the proof. Sharpe's sprinter holds the obverse; the reverse, a heraldic eagle, was the work of Mint engraver James Peed.