William Marks Simpson

William Marks Simpson was a Virginia-born sculptor who, for a few years in the late 1930s, shaped how Americans pictured their own history in silver. Born in Norfolk on August 24, 1903, he took an unusual path into art. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Virginia Military Institute in 1924 — a soldier's school, not an art academy — before turning to sculpture in earnest.

He trained at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, part of the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, and went on to win a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Rome was the proving ground for serious American sculptors of his generation. He came home with the classical training that shows in every coin he touched.

By the 1930s Simpson kept a studio in Baltimore with his wife, the sculptor Marjorie Emory Simpson — herself a Rinehart graduate. They married in 1936. He taught at the Maryland Institute and later directed it, and he eventually taught back at his old military college, the Virginia Military Institute, in the 1950s. When the United States Bureau of the Mint needed designs for new commemorative coins, it turned to him three times in two years.

The war pulled him away from the studio. Simpson served with the Army in the Pacific from 1942 to 1946. There he put his hands to a different kind of work — designing the Guadalcanal American memorial and decorative grille-work for Army headquarters in Honolulu — and was given the Army Commendation Medal for it. He died on October 22, 1958.

Simpson's coins all come from a narrow window — 1936 to 1937 — and they share a sculptor's instinct for the human figure over the heraldic emblem. The reverse — the tails side — is usually where he did his best thinking.

His most admired work is the reverse of the Roanoke Island half dollar (1937), struck for the 350th anniversary of England's doomed "Lost Colony." It shows Eleanor Dare cradling her infant daughter, Virginia Dare — the first English child born in the New World — with two sailing ships behind them. The idea didn't come from a book. Simpson visited the coast of North Carolina and watched a guard's wife at the Wright Brothers memorial holding her own baby, looking out to sea. He described wanting "the young woman holding her child close to her breast gazing far off to the horizon." Critics found the Walter Raleigh portrait on the obverse — the heads side — merely pleasant; the mother and child they singled out for praise.

The same year brought the Battle of Antietam half dollar, marking 75 years since the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. Simpson paired the two opposing commanders, Robert E. Lee and George McClellan, on the obverse — both facing left, an unusual side-by-side of enemies — and put Burnside's Bridge, where so many men fell, on the reverse. He finished the models in April 1937, and the Commission of Fine Arts (the federal body that vets coin and monument designs) approved them the same day. President Franklin Roosevelt received the first specimen that August.

His Norfolk, Virginia, Bicentennial half dollar was a true collaboration with his wife Marjorie. It celebrated Norfolk's hometown history — 200 years as a royal borough, 100 as a city. The two leaned heavily on civic symbols: the city seal with its three-masted ship on one side, and on the other the ceremonial city mace topped by a British crown. That last detail gives the coin a peculiar distinction — it is often called the only U.S. coin to show the British crown. The art historian Cornelius Vermeule later judged the busy obverse a misstep, joking that "two heads need not be better than one." It is the one design where Simpson's gift for the single, quiet figure gave way to clutter.