Bill J. Leftwich

Bill Leftwich grew up in Dallas and went off to Texas A&M in the fall of 1940 — and then the world caught fire. He joined the Army and served in Europe as a tank commander and sergeant with the 12th Armored Division. He fought through the Rhineland, the Ardennes, and into central Germany, and he was awarded the Silver Star — the U.S. military's third-highest decoration for valor — for gallantry in action. The Ardennes fighting was the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last great winter gamble in the west.

He survived it. He came home, finished at Texas A&M, and spent a few uneasy years that included riding with the U.S. inspectors fighting foot-and-mouth disease in Mexico — work he later turned into a book, The Cow Killers, with the Texas writer Fred Gipson. Then he did what he'd always wanted to do: he made art for a living, and he kept at it for the rest of his life.

Leftwich settled in Fort Davis, in the mountains of far West Texas, where his home doubled as his studio. Painter, sculptor, leatherworker, writer, teller of tall and true stories — to the town he was a fixture; to the wider world of Western art he was the real article, a man drawing the cowboy life because he had lived it. He died there, in his sleep, in April 2009, at 85, and was buried in the national veterans' cemetery in Dallas.

Leftwich worked in the great tradition of Texas Western art — cowboys, cavalry, the desert light of the Big Bend — and he worked in bronze as readily as on canvas. His training was Texan through and through: study at the Dallas Institute of Fine Arts and the San Antonio Academy of Art, and a spell under the celebrated Texas landscape painter Porfirio Salinas.

His most public sculpture is a soldier he never met but plainly understood. In 1984 Leftwich designed the six-foot bronze of Audie Murphy — the most decorated American soldier of World War II, and a fellow Texan — that stands at Camp Mabry in Austin, outside the state's military museum. It is a fitting commission: one combat veteran of the war casting another in bronze, in standard-issue gear, for good.

That same authority is why the U.S. Mint's choice for the 1993 World War II 50th Anniversary half dollar makes such sense. The reverse — the "tails" side — is Leftwich's. He drew an American serviceman flat on a beachhead, rifle in hand, a plane crossing overhead and landing craft standing offshore: the amphibious assault that defined so much of the war in the Pacific. He was not illustrating a battle from a book. He had been the man on the ground. (The obverse — the "heads" side, with three servicemen's faces over a "V" for victory and a bomber above — was designed by the Chicago artist George Klauba. As with most modern commemoratives, a U.S. Mint sculptor-engraver translated the designs into the actual coin dies.)