James Peed

James Melvin Peed was born on April 25, 1945, in the small port town of Washington, North Carolina. His path to the U.S. Mint did not run through an art academy at first — it ran through the U.S. Army, where he served from 1963 to 1966.

Only afterward did he chase the training. He studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1969, took classes at Northern Virginia Community College in 1971–72, and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts — one of the oldest art schools in the country — in 1973.

He joined the Mint's staff in 1972 and worked as a graphic artist in its Washington, D.C. office from 1975, eventually rising to manage the Mint's graphics group. That title is worth pausing on. Peed was not primarily a sculptor-engraver — the in-house artists who cut and model a coin's relief — but a designer who shaped the drawing a coin starts from. On more than one famous piece, his idea on paper became someone else's three-dimensional model in steel.

The clearest example is the 1984 Olympic ten-dollar gold eagle. It was a landmark: the first gold coin the United States struck since 1933, and the first U.S. coin to carry the "W" mint mark of the West Point Mint. Its obverse — the heads side — shows a male and a female runner lifting an Olympic torch together. That image grew from a concept sketch by James Peed, which the Mint's John Mercanti then designed and modeled into the finished coin. The drawing was Peed's; the steel relief was a collaboration.

You see the same division of labor on his best-known piece, the 1997 Franklin Delano Roosevelt five-dollar gold half eagle. Peed designed its reverse — the tails side — choosing to render the Presidential Seal as it appeared at FDR's 1933 inauguration. The sculptor Thomas D. Rogers translated that design into a model. (The obverse portrait of Roosevelt was the work of Mint sculptor-engraver T. James Ferrell.)

His hand shows up across the modern commemorative era this way: the reverse of the 1992 Olympic five-dollar gold half eagle, the reverse modeling for the 1997 Jackie Robinson five-dollar gold coin, and the reverse of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy silver dollar, done with Thomas D. Rogers Sr. Beyond circulating-format coins, he won the competition to design the 1986 Vietnam Veterans National Medal — a reminder that the man who drew Olympic runners had himself worn the uniform two decades earlier.