Edgar Z. Steever IV

Edgar Zell Steever IV was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on January 27, 1915. He trained as an artist before "artist" and "coin" usually went in the same sentence — Deerfield Academy, then Yale, where he took a degree in art history in 1936 before earning two more degrees at the Yale School of Fine Arts: a BFA in 1938 and an MFA in 1940.

Sculpture, not coins, was his first world. He taught at the Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut and cast bronzes and commemorative plaques — including, by one account, the leopard mascot at Lafayette College. That sculptor's instinct mattered later. A coin is a relief — a raised image standing off a flat field, read by the eye and the thumb at once — and the people who design them best tend to be the people who already think in three dimensions.

He came to the United States Mint in Philadelphia in 1964 and stayed for 38 years, rising to senior sculptor-engraver before he retired in 2002. He died on November 26, 2006, at age 91. Across that long career his work landed in millions of hands without his name ever being attached. That was the job. As his son Sanford put it, he was "proud to have so much of his art find its way into people's pockets."

A sculptor-engraver at the Mint is the person who takes a coin from idea to metal. Steever both designed images and modeled them in relief — sculpting the oversized plaster from which a coin's master die is eventually cut. He worked in the era just before the Mint opened its design competitions to outside artists, when the in-house engraving staff carried nearly every U.S. coin.

His range was wide. He designed circulating coinage and banknotes for foreign governments — Liberia, Nationalist China, and the Philippines among them — and he modeled medals, including a U.S. Mint medal honoring the composers George and Ira Gershwin. He even contributed to a 1982 gold commemorative honoring architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1996 the American Numismatic Association gave him its Numismatic Art Award.

But the work most people have actually held is his commemorative coinage from the program's revival years. The obverse — the "heads" side — was often where he made his mark, and four of those obverses and reverses are credited to him on colcur.

1986 Statue of Liberty half dollar. Steever's obverse is one of the most cinematic on any modern U.S. coin: the Statue's raised torch over a 1913-era New York skyline, an ocean liner steaming in, the sun rising behind it all. It reads as a single arrival — a new life beginning. Sherl Joseph Winter sculpted the reverse, a family of immigrants looking out over the harbor.

1992 White House dollar. For the 200th anniversary of the White House cornerstone, Steever designed the obverse: the building's north portico flanked by the dates 1792 and 1992. Chester Y. Martin's reverse pairs it with a bust of the original architect, James Hoban.

1994 P.O.W. dollar. Here Steever worked the other side. The obverse — a chained eagle breaking free through barbed wire — was Tom Nielsen's. Steever's reverse rendered the proposed National Prisoner of War Museum, turning an unbuilt floor plan into something you could hold.

1999 Yellowstone dollar. His obverse shows a geyser erupting against the park's treeline — Old Faithful's world in miniature. William C. Cousins designed the reverse, an American bison beneath a rising sun.