Robert Ingersoll Aitken

Robert Ingersoll Aitken was born in San Francisco on May 8, 1878, and he was sculpting professionally before most artists finish school. He trained at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art — the school that became the San Francisco Art Institute — under the noted sculptor Douglas Tilden. By 1901 he was teaching there himself, still in his early twenties.

His early work is woven into the city that raised him. The winged figure of Victory atop the Dewey Monument in Union Square is his. So is the towering "Republic" figure of the William McKinley Memorial in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. These are the kind of public, allegorical statues a young Beaux-Arts sculptor built a reputation on — confident, classical, larger than life.

Aitken moved to New York, taught at the Art Students League, and rose to the top of his field. He was elected to the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In an era when the Olympics still awarded medals for art, he entered the sculpture competition at the 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam. He died in New York on January 3, 1949.

Aitken belonged to the Beaux-Arts tradition — the turn-of-the-century style that reached for ancient Greece and Rome to dignify modern American institutions. His figures are calm, idealized, and built to carry meaning at a glance: a goddess for wisdom, an owl for learning, a frontiersman for the westward push.

His most famous work needs no museum visit. The west pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington — the sculptured triangle above the columns — is his. The architect Cass Gilbert gave him a free hand, asking only that the result "be worthy of the great Supreme Court." Aitken filled it with allegorical figures of Liberty, Order, and Authority, and carved beneath them three words that have become the building's motto: Equal Justice Under Law.

That same instinct — make the idea legible, make it noble — is exactly what coin design demands. A coin is a relief sculpture a few centimeters wide, struck millions of times, read in a glance. Aitken approached his coins the way he approached a pediment: a clear allegory, classically posed, with the lettering and the symbolism doing real work. The scholar Cornelius Vermeule, in his standard history Numismatic Art in America, singled out Aitken's coinage for its Renaissance medallic sensibility — the look of a struck art medal rather than a piece of pocket change.

The clearest proof is the coin collectors prize most. In 1915, asked to design a fifty-dollar gold piece for San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Aitken put the goddess Minerva on the obverse — the "heads" side — in a crested helmet pushed back to signal peace. On the reverse he placed her sacred owl, perched on a pine branch. The coin came in two shapes: a round version and a striking octagonal one, its eight sides ringed with eight dolphins. The dolphins, Aitken said, expressed "the uninterrupted water route" the new Panama Canal had opened between the oceans. It was his first coin, and it remains one of the most admired in the American series.