Don Troiani — the painter who put the Civil War on three coins

Don Troiani does not paint the Civil War from imagination. He paints it from the actual buttons, muskets, and forage caps of the men who fought it.

Born in New York City in 1949, Troiani trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Art Students League in New York between 1967 and 1971 — the classical, draftsmanship-first schools, not the abstract avant-garde of his era. He chose to point that training at one subject: America's military past, above all the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

What sets him apart is his method. Troiani keeps one of the great private collections of American military artifacts — uniforms, insignia, equipment, and weapons — and a reference library of thousands of volumes. He poses live models in the real gear, walks the real ground, and checks the weather and the buildings against the historical record. A single painting can take years between idea and finished canvas because the research won't be rushed. In 1980 he helped found the Society of American Historical Artists, built around exactly that standard: get it right, or don't paint it.

That obsession is why the U.S. Mint came knocking.

In 1995 the Mint released three coins to mark a century of organized effort to save Civil War battlefields — a clad half dollar, a 90% silver dollar, and a $5 gold half eagle. Troiani designed the obverse — the "heads" side — of all three. That is unusual. Commemorative programs almost always spread the work across several artists; getting one hand on every front of a set is a real distinction.

He gave each coin a human moment rather than a portrait or a monument. The half dollar shows a Civil War drummer boy. The silver dollar shows an infantryman lifting a canteen to the lips of a wounded foe — mercy in the middle of a war. The gold half eagle shows a bugler on horseback sounding a call to the troops. These are scenes, not symbols, and they carry the same documentary care as his paintings.

A coin, though, is not a canvas. A painter hands off a drawing; a Mint sculptor-engraver turns it into the three-dimensional relief — the raised metal — that a coining press can actually strike. Troiani's obverses were modeled for striking, and each reverse (the "tails" side) was the work of staff Mint artists: T. James Ferrell on the half dollar, John Mercanti on the silver dollar, and Alfred Maletsky on the gold, whose eagle clutches a banner reading "Let Us Protect and Preserve." The result is a clean division of labor — the historian's eye on the front, the Mint's engravers finishing the set.