Bela Lyon Pratt: the sculptor who carved a coin the wrong way round

Bela Lyon Pratt was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on December 11, 1867, into a family that already had art in its bloodstream — his grandfather had founded one of the country's first music schools. By sixteen he was studying at the Yale School of Fine Arts. That was fast, and it set the pattern for a career that never really slowed down.

From Yale he went to New York and the Art Students League, where he fell into the orbit of the man who would shape him for life: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the greatest American sculptor of the age. Then came Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts, training under Henri Chapu and Alexandre Falguière — the classic finishing school for an ambitious American artist of the 1880s.

He came home with a continent's worth of technique and almost immediately got the kind of break sculptors dream of. For the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago — the great white city of fairs — he modeled two monumental allegorical groups, The Genius of Navigation and The Genius of Discovery. He was in his mid-twenties.

That same period, in 1893, he took a teaching post at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He held it for the rest of his life — about twenty-five years — and built a reputation as one of New England's busiest public sculptors. His studio in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston turned out statues, memorials, and architectural figures by the dozen. He died in May 1917, at just 49, of heart disease. He had made, by one local account, more than 180 sculptures in under fifty years of life.

Pratt was a monument man. His hands knew bronze and marble at architectural scale — the kind of figure that has to read from across a plaza. So the commission that made him famous to coin collectors is almost a joke of scale: the two smallest U.S. gold coins, each barely an inch across.

Here's how he got it. President Theodore Roosevelt had launched a campaign to drag American coinage out of what he saw as dull mediocrity, and he'd handed the first jobs to Saint-Gaudens. But Saint-Gaudens died in 1907. Into the gap stepped Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, a Boston physician, art collector, and Roosevelt friend, fresh from years steeped in the art of Japan and the ancient world. Bigelow had an idea, and he had a sculptor in mind for it — Pratt, his fellow Bostonian.

The idea was radical. Every coin in your pocket has relief — the design (the heads, the eagle) stands up off the surface. Bigelow proposed the opposite: incuse relief, where the design is sunk below the flat field of the coin, like a footprint pressed into clay. The inspiration was ancient — Egyptian carving, where figures are cut into the stone rather than raised from it. Bigelow argued it was practical too: a coin with nothing sticking up would stack neatly and the design would be protected from wear, tucked safely below the rim.

Bigelow pitched it to Roosevelt over lunch at the White House on April 3, 1908. Pratt did the modeling. His plaster models went to the Mint that June, and by autumn the first coins were struck. For the obverse — the heads side — Pratt put a Native American man in a feathered war bonnet, facing left, his own initials BLP tucked above the date. The reverse carried a standing eagle on a bundle of arrows, gripping an olive branch.

It was a genuine break with the past. Earlier "Indian Head" coins had really been Liberty in a borrowed headdress. Pratt's was meant to be an actual Native American face. (Collectors have long named the model as the Brulé Lakota chief Hollow Horn Bear — the attribution is supported by research but was never confirmed by the Mint, so treat it as the likely story rather than settled fact.)

Not everyone was charmed. The Philadelphia coin dealer Samuel H. Chapman fired off a letter to Roosevelt in December 1908 with a list of objections that has delighted historians ever since: the sunken design, he warned, would harbor dirt and germs, the coins couldn't be stacked properly, they'd be easy to counterfeit, and — for good measure — he thought the Indian looked "emaciated." Bigelow's reply was pure dry wit: the photograph showed a man "whose health was excellent," and perhaps Chapman had in mind "the fatter but less characteristic type of Indian sometimes seen on the reservations." The design stayed exactly as Pratt made it.