T. James Ferrell

Thomas James Ferrell came to coins late, and from the side door. He was born in Clayton, New Jersey, in 1939, trained as a fine artist, and spent his early career as a painter and a newspaper man — six years at the Philadelphia Bulletin — before a medal ever bore his name.

His schooling was serious. He graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1963, where he studied painting, sculpture and graphics, then put in two more years at the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia. Along the way he won the academy's Cresson traveling scholarship to Europe and its Charles Toppan Prize for oil painting. He was, first and last, a draftsman with a sculptor's eye.

The pivot to metal came in 1969, when he joined The Franklin Mint — the private medal maker, not the U.S. Mint — as a medalist. He stayed about twenty years and rose into management without putting down his tools, working in the shadow of Gilroy Roberts, the former U.S. Mint chief engraver whose Kennedy half dollar portrait was already a household image. When Ferrell finally walked into the United States Mint in August 1989, he arrived as a fully formed artist in his fifties, not an apprentice.

Ferrell's job title at the Mint was simple — Engraver — but the work spanned the whole arc from blank page to struck coin. A Mint engraver sketches the design, then sculpts it in large-scale relief (usually in clay or plaster) before that model is reduced and cut into the hardened steel die — the stamp that presses the image into metal. Get the relief wrong and the coin won't strike up cleanly; get the portrait wrong and it haunts every example ever made. Ferrell did both halves well.

His timing put him at the center of a boom. The late 1980s and 1990s were the great age of the modern U.S. commemorative — coins struck to mark an anniversary or honor a cause, sold to collectors with a surcharge that funded the cause itself. Congress authorized them by the dozen, and the Mint's small engraving staff had to feed the appetite. Ferrell became one of its most productive hands, modeling more than thirty commemoratives between 1990 and the early 2000s.

The range tells you something about his reach. He cut the obverse — the heads side — of the 1992 Christopher Columbus Quincentenary half dollar, showing the explorer striding ashore, and designed its reverse with the three ships as well. He portrayed Thomas Jefferson on the 1993 anniversary silver dollar, both sides. He gave the 1997 Franklin D. Roosevelt gold five-dollar piece its obverse portrait, and the 1997 Jackie Robinson silver dollar its aged, dignified likeness of the man who broke baseball's color line. He did the obverse of the 2002 West Point Bicentennial dollar and the 2003 Wright brothers First Flight dollar. The list runs on — Korean War, Civil War battlefields, the Smithsonian, Leif Ericson, Mount Rushmore.

Then, when the 50 State Quarters program turned circulating coins into a national collecting craze, Ferrell modeled five of them: Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Vermont. For a few years his hand was, quietly, in a great many American pockets.

His private commissions were grander still. Working through the Mint's medal program, he sculpted Congressional Gold Medals — the highest civilian honor the legislature can bestow — for Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and the evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth.

The numismatic world noticed. In 2002 the American Numismatic Association gave Ferrell its Numismatic Art Award for Excellence in Medallic Sculpture, the field's main recognition for the artists who actually shape coins and medals rather than merely catalog them. He retired from the Mint the following March, and died in 2020 at the age of eighty.

He is one of those names that almost no one outside the hobby knows, yet whose work nearly every American has held. That is the strange fate of the coin engraver: the art is everywhere, the artist invisible. Ferrell's signature on a coin is just two letters in the field — but the portraits are unmistakably his.