William Woodward

William Woodward was a painter, not a coiner. He spent his life on canvas — big, dramatic murals in the manner of the Old Masters — and he was very good at it. So how did a fine-art professor end up with his name on a federal coin?

He was born in Washington, D.C., on March 11, 1935, a third-generation Washingtonian. He studied at American University, then won a fellowship that sent him to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence for two years in the late 1950s — the city of Michelangelo and Botticelli, where he learned to paint the way the Renaissance masters did. He even spent time as a guest of the famed art historian Bernard Berenson.

Back home, he became a fixture of Washington art. For decades he taught at George Washington University, where he ran the Master of Fine Arts program from 1969 to 2006 — nearly four decades shaping the city's painters. His own murals hang in places that matter to American memory: a vision of Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home, Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, Dolley Madison rescuing George Washington's portrait. He died on June 14, 2023, at 88.

He was, in short, a serious painter with a serious feel for American history. That turned out to be exactly what the Mint needed.

In 1989, Congress turned 200, and the Mint struck commemorative coins to mark it. The centerpiece was a silver dollar, and the Mint ran an invitational competition — it asked a handful of artists to submit designs. Woodward won. And he won with both sides.

That is the thing that makes him singular. On most coins, the obverse (the "heads" side) and the reverse (the "tails" side) come from two different artists. Woodward designed both faces of the 1989 Congress dollar — and he remains the only artist to have done so for a circulating-format U.S. coin won through such a competition.

His obverse shows the Statue of Freedom, the bronze figure that crowns the U.S. Capitol dome — the same statue sculptors had wrestled into place 130 years earlier. His reverse shows the mace of the House of Representatives, the ceremonial staff that sits beside the Speaker's rostrum when the House is in session. It's an unusual, knowing choice: most people have never heard of the mace, but to anyone who knows Congress, it's the symbol of the House's authority. A painter who'd spent his life studying American history picked exactly the right object.

Here's a subtlety worth understanding. A designer is not always the person who sculpts the coin. Woodward drew the designs; a Mint sculptor-engraver named Chester Y. Martin turned them into the three-dimensional relief — the raised model from which the dies are cut. That collaboration is normal at the Mint, and it's why two names appear on the record for one coin. Woodward also designed the reverse of the companion Congress half dollar — a full view of the Capitol building ringed with stars — which was modeled by the Mint's Edgar Z. Steever IV.

For a man who painted in oils on hand-stretched canvas, working in metal at the scale of a coin was a leap. He pulled it off well enough to earn a place in numismatic history on his first try.