Edward R. Grove

Edward Ryneal Grove spent his working life putting tiny portraits onto metal and paper — and he was very good at it long before he ever touched a coin.

He was born on August 14, 1912, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. He trained in Washington, D.C., at the National School of Art and at the school of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where the sculptor Heinz Warneke was among his teachers. That mix — fine-art sculpture plus the exacting trade of engraving — shaped everything that came after.

His first long chapter was at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, from 1936 to 1947. He started as a die-sinker — the person who cuts the hardened steel dies that stamp an image — and rose to engraving the portraits and vignettes on currency and postage. Several of his engravings appeared on U.S. stamps. Then came fifteen years as a portrait engraver at the Security-Columbian Banknote Company. By the time the Mint hired him, Grove had already spent a quarter-century learning to make a human face come alive at the size of a fingernail.

Grove joined the United States Mint in Philadelphia in 1962 as a sculptor-engraver, working under Chief Engraver Gilroy Roberts. He stayed only until 1965 — a short tenure that happened to land him in one of the strangest assignments in U.S. coinage.

In 1965 the country was running out of silver, and the Mint had to find a new metal for the dime, quarter, and half dollar. To test candidate alloys, it needed dies — but stamping test metals with real coin designs risked creating accidental rarities collectors would chase. The Mint's solution was a fantasy design: a coin-like piece tied to no real denomination. Grove engraved its obverse — the heads side — a portrait of Martha Washington. His colleague Philip Fowler engraved the reverse, showing Mount Vernon. Because the design belongs to no real coin, the Mint has reused these dies for metal trials again and again, into recent decades. It is, in a quiet way, the most-struck design most people have never seen.

Grove left the Mint in 1965 and, in 1967, moved with his wife — the sculptor Jean Donner Grove — to Florida, where he worked independently as a sculptor, medalist, and painter for the rest of his life. Medals were his true specialty. He is best remembered in numismatic circles for his work on Presidential Art Medals' World War II series and for medals he produced for the Society of Medalists. His peers honored the craft: the American Numismatic Association's Award for Excellence in Medallic Sculpture in 1969, and the American Numismatic Society's J. Sanford Saltus Medal — its highest honor for a medallic artist — in 1985. He was a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society. He died on November 19, 2002, in Florida.