Philip Fowler

Philip E. Fowler spent twenty-four years doing work almost no one would ever see by his name. He was a sculptor-engraver — the person who turns a coin design into the hardened steel die, the stamp that presses the image into metal — at the United States Mint. Most of what he made wore someone else's portrait or carried no signature at all.

He was born in New York City on March 2, 1926. He served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, then trained as an artist at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia — two of the oldest art schools in the country. On April 9, 1962, he was appointed an assistant engraver at the Philadelphia Mint, part of a wave of new talent the Mint hired in the early 1960s. He stayed until he retired on March 3, 1986.

Fowler was a member of the National Sculpture Society, the body of American sculptors founded in 1893. He died in San Diego, California, on June 13, 2000.

A Mint engraver's job is mostly invisible by design. Fowler modeled and cut dies for medals far more than coins — the long roll of official Treasury and Mint medals that mark anniversaries, dedications, and outgoing officials. He cut the reverse of the bronze medals honoring Treasury figures like David M. Kennedy and Mary Brooks (the Mint's director in the 1970s), reverses for the Assay Commission medals of 1966 and 1969, and a string of commemorative pieces — a Saint Louis Bicentennial medal in 1964, a Castle Clinton medal in 1965, medals for new Mint buildings at Denver and West Point. This is the steady, anonymous output of a career staff engraver, and it filled most of his years.

His most visible coin work came in the gold of the early 1980s. The Mint's American Arts Commemorative Series — large gold medallions sold as a homegrown answer to South Africa's Krugerrand — honored American writers and artists. Fowler is credited with the obverse portrait of poet Robert Frost on the one-ounce medallion and the reverse of the John Steinbeck piece. The Frost reverse carried three lines from "The Road Not Taken," which makes Fowler's portrait of the poet the face on one of the few pieces of U.S. gold to quote a poem.

But the work that outlasted him is the one almost no collector can legally own.

In 1965 the Mint needed test coins. It was switching the dime and quarter from silver to a copper-nickel sandwich, and engineers had to see how new metal alloys flowed and filled a die before committing real coinage to them. The problem: a test coin stamped with a real design could leak the future, or worse, escape into circulation as money. The Mint's answer was a pair of nonsense dies — images that look like a coin but aren't legal tender and carry no denomination.

Edward R. Grove, a fellow engraver, modeled the obverse: a portrait of Martha Washington, the first First Lady. Fowler cut the reverse — Mount Vernon, the Washington family home on the Potomac, with his initials tucked below the right side of the building. It was never meant to be a beautiful coin. It was meant to be a blank check for metallurgy: a face the Mint could strike in any experimental alloy without revealing anything real.

That is exactly why it never went away. The Mint reached for the Martha Washington and Mount Vernon dies again in 1982 and 1999, and around 2011–2013 — when Congress asked whether the cent and the nickel could be made of something cheaper — the Mint struck a fresh run of Martha Washington test pieces in trial metals at Philadelphia. Most are destroyed; a handful have escaped, and collectors prize them precisely because they're the rare coins the Mint never intended anyone to keep. Sixty years on, when the United States quietly experiments with what its money is made of, it is still pressing Philip Fowler's drawing of George Washington's house into the metal.