Juliette May Fraser

Juliette May Fraser was born in Honolulu on January 27, 1887 — when Hawaii was still a kingdom, ruled by King Kalākaua. Her mother was a teacher, the first principal of the Kaʻiulani School; her father kept books as an accountant. The islands she would spend a lifetime painting were, in her childhood, a sovereign nation, not yet a U.S. territory.

She did the expected things first. She finished Honolulu's Punahou School in 1905, earned a degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1909, and came home to teach — history, English, and Latin — at Punahou. Then she chose the harder road. She saved her teacher's salary and sailed for New York to study at the Art Students League, the training ground of a generation of American artists, and later at a landscape-painting school in Woodstock.

For the rest of a long life — she died in Honolulu in 1983, at ninety-six — Fraser was Hawaii's artist. She painted murals, cut linoleum prints, made frescoes, and wrote as an art critic for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser. What set her apart was the depth of her feeling for Native Hawaiian culture and history, woven through nearly everything she made.

Fraser's natural scale was large. She painted ten murals for the Hawaii State Library in 1934, made charcoal panels for the Hawaii building at the 1939 world's fair in San Francisco, and even painted a chapel on the Greek island of Chios. During World War II she put her eye to work as a camouflage designer for the U.S. military. Her 1952 book of linocuts, Ke Anuenue — "The Rainbow" — won an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

So a coin was an unusual assignment for a muralist. In 1928, the Territory of Hawaii wanted a half dollar to mark 150 years since Captain James Cook reached the islands. Fraser supplied the design — the drawings the coin would be built from. For the obverse — the heads side — she leaned on a famous cameo portrait of Cook by the English potter Josiah Wedgwood, the same likeness collectors still recognize today.

But a drawing is not a coin. To become metal, a design has to be modeled in relief — sculpted in shallow three dimensions so a die can stamp it. That work fell to Chester Beach, a New York sculptor who turned Fraser's sketches into the plaster models the Mint engraved into dies. His initials, "CB," sit at the base of Cook's bust. The division of labor was typical for the era: the artist conceives, the sculptor renders. Fraser's hand is in the conception; the finished relief is Beach's.

The result is one of the most prized of all early U.S. commemoratives. The obverse shows Captain Cook in profile, ringed by the legend "CAPT. JAMES COOK DISCOVERER OF HAWAII," with eight small triangles for the eight main islands. The reverse — its concept credited to Bruce Cartwright Jr., the Honolulu numismatist who headed the coin's commission — shows a Hawaiian chief with arm outstretched, posed after the famous statue of King Kamehameha I, standing above Waikīkī with Diamond Head behind him.

Only 10,008 were struck at the Philadelphia Mint in June 1928 — 10,000 for sale, 8 held for the Assay Commission's testing. Fifty extra coins were given a special sandblast, matte finish as presentation pieces for dignitaries. At two dollars apiece, it was the most expensive commemorative half dollar of its day. They sold out fast, and the survivors are scarce. A century on, an ordinary example trades in the low thousands; a sandblast proof can reach the tens of thousands. For a painter who worked mostly in mural-sized sweeps, it is a remarkable second life — her art, multiplied ten thousand times and carried in pockets across the country.