Lyndall Bass — the painter who designed the penny in your pocket

Most people who design American coins are sculptors who work inside the Mint. Lyndall Bass is not one of them. She is a painter — still lifes, flowers, and quiet, symbol-laden figures in oil — who works out of a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And she designed the back of the penny you carry every day.

Bass was born in North Carolina on July 5, 1952. She trained the old-fashioned way: at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, under teachers who linked her straight back to the classical tradition — Arthur DeCosta, Robert Beverly Hale, and Will Barnet. She went on to earn a bachelor's in fine art (1984) and a master's (1987) from Indiana University, and she taught before settling in the Southwest. Her paintings hang in private collections around the world; her awards include a National Society of Arts and Letters honor and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant for working painters.

None of that explains how a fine-art painter ended up with her initials on a coin struck by the billion. The bridge was a U.S. Mint program most people have never heard of — and it changed the look of American money.

In 2007 the Mint selected Bass for its Artistic Infusion Program — a roster of outside artists brought in to feed fresh designs to the sculptor-engravers on staff. The idea was simple: pull working artists from across the country, hand them a brief, and let them compete. Bass entered the rolls and started submitting designs. She was a runner-up for a Virgin Islands quarter and a finalist for a First Spouse gold coin before the assignment came that would define her.

Designing for a coin is a strange discipline, and it played to her strengths. A painter can use color, depth, and a big canvas. A coin designer gets a circle smaller than a fingernail, struck in low relief — the raised height of the design above the flat field — with no color at all. Every line has to read at a glance and survive being pressed into metal millions of times. Bass's training in classical composition — making a balanced, legible picture out of a few elements — was exactly the skill the job demanded.

There is one more thing a coin designer doesn't control: the sculptor, the Mint artist who turns a flat drawing into the three-dimensional model the dies are cut from. On the cent, that was staff sculptor Joseph Menna, who later became the Mint's Chief Engraver. Both their initials ride the finished coin — LB for Bass on the lower left of the shield, JFM for Menna on the lower right.

The assignment came out of an act of Congress. The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 ordered the Mint to give the Lincoln cent a brand-new permanent reverse — the "tails" side — that would be "emblematic of President Lincoln's preservation of the United States of America as a single and united country." After the 2009 bicentennial designs celebrating Lincoln's life, the cent needed a fourth and final back.

Bass's first idea was turned down. Then, as she has told it, word came back from the committees to think along the lines of shield, eagle, laurel wreath. She fixed on a single theme — Lincoln's achievement in holding the Union together and steadying the nation's faith in its own currency — and built it around a Union Shield, an emblem of national unity that dates to the 1780s and appears throughout the Civil War era, including in the Capitol frescoes painted during Lincoln's presidency. She delivered two versions, one with a wreath and one with the shield alone. Both reached the finals. The shield won.

The design is a quiet piece of civics. Thirteen vertical stripes stand for the original states; the bar across the top binds them into one federal whole. A scroll unfurls across the front reading ONE CENT, with E PLURIBUS UNUM above and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA arched over the top. The unveiling came on November 12, 2009, and the coin entered circulation in 2010. It has been the cent's reverse ever since — which means Bass's shield sits on tens of billions of coins, on the obverse side of one of the most familiar images in the country.