Tom Nielsen

Tom Nielsen spent most of his life painting water, not designing money. From a studio near the town square in Carrollton, Georgia, he built a career of more than five decades around the sea — crashing surf, low-country marshes, the slow light over coastal Georgia. He was a signature member of the American Society of Marine Artists and served on its board. In 2004, Georgia's governor handed his paintings of the Marshes of Glynn to world leaders at the G8 summit on Sea Island.

But Nielsen reached far more people through a piece most of his collectors never saw him make. Among the public commissions he was proudest of, his own studio listed two: a commemorative medallion for the U.S. Congress, and a single silver dollar for the U.S. Mint.

That dollar was the 1994 Prisoner of War commemorative — and it is the only U.S. coin Nielsen ever designed. Numismatic accounts widely describe him as a decorated Vietnam veteran who worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which would make the assignment deeply personal. (His own art-career biography doesn't mention the military service, so treat the veteran detail as widely reported rather than first-hand.) He died on December 10, 2018.

A painter and a coin designer face the same problem from opposite ends. A painting can use a hundred shades to carry a feeling. A coin gets one metal, a circle the size of a half-crown, and relief — the height the design rises off the surface — measured in fractions of a millimeter. The whole story has to land in a single image.

Nielsen's solution was a bald eagle breaking free. On the obverse — the heads side — the bird takes flight through a ring of barbed wire, a snapped chain still trailing from one talon. There is no slogan doing the work; the picture is the argument. Captivity, and the moment it ends. For a coin honoring American prisoners of war, it's hard to imagine a tighter idea.

Like nearly every Mint commemorative, the design was a partnership. Nielsen drew it; a staff sculptor-engraver, Alfred Maletsky, translated the drawing into the three-dimensional model and dies the press actually strikes from — the slow craft of deciding exactly how high the eagle's wing should stand off the field. The reverse, showing the planned National Prisoner of War Museum, was the work of Mint sculptor Edgar Z. Steever IV. The surcharge built into every coin's price helped pay for that museum, which opened at the Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia — the ground where one of the deadliest Civil War prison camps once stood, less than two hundred miles from Nielsen's own studio.