Olin Levi Warner

Olin Levi Warner was born on a farm in Suffield, Connecticut, on April 9, 1844. He did not start out an artist. As a young man he worked as an artisan and as a telegraph operator — tapping out messages while he saved money for a different life.

That life was Paris. In 1869 he sailed for France and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in the world, where he studied sculpture under François Jouffroy. He also worked as an assistant to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, one of the great French sculptors of the age — a real apprenticeship, hands in the clay beside a master.

His timing was dramatic. When France declared the Third Republic in 1870 and Prussian armies closed in on Paris, Warner enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He went back to his studies only after the siege lifted in 1871. A year later he came home for good, settling in New York City and opening a studio in 1872.

Recognition came slowly, and money came more slowly still. Warner helped found the Society of American Artists in 1877 and became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1888 — respect from his peers. But commissions were thin enough that he spent stretches back at his father's Vermont farm, taking work designing for makers of silver and plated ware to keep going.

Warner's gift was the portrait in low relief — the bas-relief, a sculpted image that rises only slightly from a flat background, the way a face rises from the surface of a coin. He is often credited with helping popularize the form in America. His portrait medallions and busts are quiet, dignified, alive in a way that flat profiles rarely are.

His most ambitious portraits came from a trip through the Northwest. Warner met Native American leaders and modeled a series of medallions of individual chiefs — real people, studied from life, at a moment when most American art was content to render "the Indian" as a type. It is the same instinct that made his coin work: catch the specific human face, not the symbol.

That instinct collided with the practical world of the United States Mint in 1892. The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago — the great fair marking 400 years since Columbus crossed the Atlantic — needed a souvenir coin to raise money. The Mint's own chief engraver, Charles E. Barber, drew first, basing Columbus on a Renaissance painting. The art world savaged the result; one paper said it looked less like Columbus than "a long-haired professor." The fair's organizers needed a rescue.

Warner — by then serving as the exposition's director of decorations — supplied it. He proposed a Columbus in profile (drawn from the fair's own badges) for the front, and for the back a caravel, evoking Columbus's flagship the Santa María, sailing above the two hemispheres of the globe, with 1492 below. The fair's artists approved it. In September 1892 the Mint agreed to use Warner's concept for both sides.

Here is the twist that makes Warner a kind of ghost. By Mint rule, only Mint engravers could cut the working dies. Barber adapted Warner's obverse — shrinking it to fit the legends — and signed it with his "B." Barber's assistant George T. Morgan reworked the ship and tucked his "M" into the rigging. So the coin the public bought, and that catalogs still credit to Barber and Morgan, was Warner's idea wearing two other men's initials. The result, the Columbian half dollar, became the first commemorative coin the United States ever struck — and the first U.S. coin to portray a real historical person.

Warner did not have long to enjoy it. In 1895 he won the kind of commission a sculptor dreams of: three sets of bronze doors for the new Library of Congress in Washington. He had finished one pair — the figures "Tradition," with its panels of Memory and Imagination — when, on August 14, 1896, he died after a bicycle accident in New York's Central Park. He was 52. The sculptor Herbert Adams completed the remaining doors.