Sherl Joseph Winter

Sherl Joseph Winter was a sculptor first and a coin man second. Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1934, he trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, earning a fine-arts degree in 1959. His teacher there was Walker Hancock — one of the great American medallic sculptors, and the man who first showed Winter how to carve a portrait that would survive being shrunk to the size of a thumbnail and stamped into metal.

That skill is rarer than it sounds. A sculptor who works in marble works at the scale of a room. A sculptor who works for a mint has to make a face, a hand, an animal read clearly at the width of a coin — and survive being pressed into millions of identical strikes. Winter learned that discipline early, and it shaped the rest of his career.

He joined the United States Mint in 1967 as a sculptor-engraver — the staff artists who turn a design into the actual steel die, the hardened punch that stamps the image into a coin blank. He stayed 16 years. When longtime Chief Engraver Frank Gasparro retired, Winter served as Acting Chief Engraver, the head of the Mint's small band of in-house sculptors.

Winter's most-seen work is one most people never connect to a name. In 1986 the Mint launched the American Gold Eagle, the country's official gold bullion coin. The reverse — the tails side — shows a male eagle gliding home with an olive branch toward a nest where a female eagle guards two eaglets. The artist Miley Busiek Frost conceived that image as a tribute to the American family. Winter is the one who sculpted it into the relief that was struck onto the coin.

That design stayed in production until 2021. For 35 years, every American Gold Eagle carried Winter's modeling of those birds — making him, quietly, one of the most widely circulated American sculptors of his generation.

He had a gift for the human side of a coin, too. He designed the reverse of the 1986 Statue of Liberty half dollar, which shows an immigrant family arriving at Ellis Island — not the statue itself, but the people who sailed past it. And he designed the reverse of the 1988 Seoul Olympiad silver dollar: the five Olympic rings cradled inside a wreath, struck for the Summer Games in Korea.

After 16 years he left the Mint and opened the Winter Art Studio in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia with his wife. He kept sculpting — medals for private mints, liturgical work for churches, and public pieces around the city. Late in life, from 2005 to 2009, he served on the federal advisory committee that helped vet themes and designs for commemorative coins and medals. He died in 2020 at 85.