Phebe Hemphill: the hand that shapes Liberty

Phebe Hemphill grew up surrounded by small bronze faces. Her father collected Franklin Mint coins. Her grandfather, Gibbons Gray Cornwell Jr., collected medals and carved bas-relief sculpture — art that rises just slightly off a flat surface, the way a face lifts off a coin. By her own account, that was where the spark caught. "My dad was a collector of Franklin Mint coins, so I was exposed to numismatic art in my youth," she told CoinWeek. Of her grandfather: "My grandfather was a big influence on me. When I was young, he was collecting medals."

That family line runs deeper than a hobby. Hemphill is descended from Martha Jackson Cornwell, a great-great aunt who studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens — the sculptor whose 1907 double eagle is still widely called the most beautiful coin America ever made. "I have a deep connection to the Saint-Gaudens tradition through a great-great aunt," Hemphill has said. It's a rare thing for a working coin artist to be able to trace a direct line back to the master who set the standard for the whole field.

Born April 25, 1960, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, she trained as a fine artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating in 1987, and studied privately under the sculptor Evangelos Frudakis. But she did not walk straight into the U.S. Mint. The path took a long, unglamorous detour — and that detour is part of what made her good.

Out of art school, Hemphill joined the Franklin Mint — the private mint famous for collectible medals and porcelain — and stayed fifteen years, from 1987 to 2002. She started in the porcelain department and moved into medallic art, learning the unforgiving discipline of low relief: how to suggest a whole human form in a sliver of depth, where every fraction of a millimeter reads on the finished piece. The work earned her real recognition — the National Sculpture Society's Alex J. Ettel Grant in 2000, and the Franklin Mint's own Renaissance Sculpture Award in 2001.

Then came the swerve. From 2002 to 2005 she worked as a staff sculptor at McFarlane Toys, the company behind hyper-detailed action figures. It sounds like a world away from a national mint — and it was — but sculpting toys is a master class in reading a form in the round, catching a likeness, and pushing fine detail to its limit. In 2006 she brought all of it to the United States Mint in Philadelphia, joining the small in-house team of sculptor-engravers who turn artists' drawings into the metal in your hand.

To understand what Hemphill actually does, you have to know how a modern U.S. coin gets made. Most designs start as a flat drawing by an artist — often someone in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, a roster of outside designers. That drawing is only half a coin. Someone still has to sculpt it: build the image up in three dimensions, decide how high each element stands, where the light will catch, where a shadow will fall. That is the sculptor-engraver's job, and it is the difference between a coin that looks alive and one that looks like a printed sticker.

Hemphill works the way the old masters did, only with new tools. She builds her relief on oversized blanks — sometimes in clay, sometimes in digital 3-D software — then the design is reduced to coin size. Her signature is high relief: designs that rise dramatically off the field, the way a real sculpture does, instead of lying nearly flat. High relief is hard. It fights the way modern coins are struck, and it takes a sculptor who can judge exactly how much depth a press can capture in a single blow. It is no accident that the Mint kept handing her the high-relief gold coins.

Her stated influences are a who's-who of the great medal artists — Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Adolph A. Weinman in America, and the French masters Jules-Clément Chaplain, Oscar Roty, and Jean-Baptiste Daniel-Dupuis, whose elegant low-relief portraits defined the golden age of the medal. That classical eye, paired with a willingness to use 3-D software, is what makes her work feel both old and new at once.

The clearest place to see Hemphill's hand is the American Liberty gold series — the Mint's showcase for high-relief artistry. She sculpted the obverse — the heads side — of the 2015 American Liberty High Relief gold coin, a robed Liberty striding forward with a torch raised and a flag on a staff, from a design by Justin Kunz. Two years later she sculpted the obverse of the 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary gold coin — the now-famous design, also by Kunz, that portrayed Liberty as an African-American woman in a crown of stars, a deliberate break from a century of classical white profiles. Both were struck in .9999 fine gold at West Point, in the demanding high relief she is known for.

She is also a fixture of the First Spouse gold coin program, which honors America's first ladies in one-ounce gold. She sculpted the obverse portrait of Bess Truman for the 2015 coin — designed by Joel Iskowitz, paired with a reverse showing a locomotive wheel for the 1948 whistle-stop campaign — and worked across the wider series, from Mary Todd Lincoln to Jacqueline Kennedy.

And she helped carry the American Innovation dollar program, the long-running series marking an invention or innovator from each state and territory. Her sculpting work includes the Rhode Island coin — Nathanael Herreshoff's record-breaking 1903 racing yacht Reliance at full sail, framed by a rope border — along with the Maine and South Carolina designs. In each case an outside artist drew it; Hemphill gave it depth.