Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin in 1848, the son of a French shoemaker and an Irish mother, and was carried to New York as an infant. He was poor, foreign, and self-made — about as far from the marble-halls art world as a boy could start.

At thirteen he was apprenticed to a cameo cutter, learning to carve tiny faces into shell and stone by the hour. It was tedious, exacting work, and it taught him the one skill that would later matter more than any other: how to put a believable human face into a space the size of a coin. He studied drawing at night at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, then crossed the Atlantic — first to Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in the world, and then to Rome, where the ancient statues and the old Greek coins got into his blood and never left.

He came home a different kind of American artist. Through the 1880s and 1890s he became the sculptor of the age — the man cities called when they wanted to remember their dead and honor their heroes. He led what's now called the American Renaissance, the generation that decided the young republic deserved art as serious as Europe's. And he did it from a New Hampshire farmhouse he named Aspet, after the Pyrenees village his father came from. The artists who followed him there turned the village of Cornish into a famous art colony.

The coins came at the very end. In 1900 he was diagnosed with cancer. He would have only seven years left, and he spent a good part of them in a fight with the United States Mint.

Saint-Gaudens worked in high relief — the parts of the figure that stand up off the surface, the opposite of a flat stamped design. A coin or a medal in high relief catches light and shadow the way a real face does; it looks carved, not printed. Most of his contemporaries flattened their figures so they'd be easy to cast and strike. He refused to.

His monuments tell you what he was after. The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston — a Union colonel riding beside the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts — took him fourteen years and is considered one of the finest bronze reliefs in America. The Adams Memorial in Washington is a shrouded, faceless figure of grief so still it stops people in their tracks. He built equestrian generals, a standing Abraham Lincoln, and a gilded Diana that once balanced on top of Madison Square Garden. Every one of them carries the same signature: movement held inside stillness, a figure that seems about to step or breathe.

That instinct is exactly what he poured into a gold coin. And it's exactly what put him at war with the Mint.

Theodore Roosevelt hated American money. On December 27, 1904, he wrote to his Treasury Secretary that the coinage was "artistically of atrocious hideousness" and asked whether he could hire "a man like Saint-Gaudens" to fix it — without bothering to ask Congress. Within a year the two men were trading letters about ancient Greek coins like a pair of enthusiasts. Roosevelt called the whole project his "pet crime" — a phrase that survives because Saint-Gaudens himself echoed it back in a letter in 1906.

The brief was simple and impossible: make a modern coin as beautiful as a two-thousand-year-old Greek one. Saint-Gaudens designed a Liberty striding straight at you — torch in one hand for enlightenment, olive branch in the other for peace, the Capitol and a sunburst behind her. For the back, an eagle in flight over a rising sun. He sculpted it in the deep, sunrise-catching high relief he used on his monuments.

That relief is where it went to war. To make Liberty stand up off the gold the way he wanted, the Mint's coining press had to strike each blank as many as nine times, annealing — softening — the metal between blows. The Mint's chief engraver, Charles E. Barber, had warned from the start that the design couldn't be mass-produced, and he was right: you cannot run a national currency at nine strikes a coin. The Mint struck a tiny number of the deepest "ultra high relief" pieces as patterns — experiments, never meant to circulate — then a few thousand of a slightly tamer high-relief version. Reported figures vary by source; only around twelve to thirteen thousand high-relief 1907 coins were made before the design had to be flattened.

Saint-Gaudens never saw it settle into the nation's pockets. He died on August 3, 1907, as the first coins were being made. Barber then reworked the design into a shallow, production-friendly relief, and the Saint-Gaudens double eagle went on to be struck — in that low-relief form — until 1933.

There was one more fight, and the artist wasn't alive for it. Roosevelt had left "In God We Trust" off the coin entirely — he thought stamping God's name on money that paid for gambling and worse was close to sacrilege. The public was outraged, Congress overruled the president, and the motto was restored by an act signed on May 19, 1908. Look closely and you can tell an early "no motto" Saint from a later one by whether that line is there at all.