Gertrude K. Lathrop

Gertrude Katherine Lathrop was born in Albany, New York, on December 24, 1896, into a family where art was simply the family business. Her mother, Ida Pulis Lathrop, painted landscapes and still lifes. Her older sister, Dorothy, became a celebrated illustrator of children's books — the first artist ever to win the Caldecott Medal. Gertrude chose clay and bronze.

She studied sculpture under Gutzon Borglum — the man who would soon be carving Mount Rushmore — first at the Art Students League of New York in 1918, then at his School of American Sculpture into the early 1920s. In the summer of 1924 she worked under the sculptor Charles Grafly in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She made her exhibition debut at the National Academy of Design in 1921 and showed regularly with the National Sculpture Society in the years that followed.

But Lathrop's heart was never really in grand monuments. It was in animals — especially young ones. "I chose to model animals," she said, "because of their infinite variety of form and texture and their great beauty, for even the lowliest of them have beauty." That single interest shaped everything she made, including her coins.

Lathrop was a medallist and an animal sculptor — someone who worked in small, precise relief, the same discipline a coin demands. Relief is the shallow, raised sculpture you feel when you run a finger across a coin's surface; getting an animal to look alive in less than a millimeter of depth is hard, and she was very good at it. Her work won the field's serious prizes: the Helen Foster Barnett Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1928, and the J. Sanford Saltus Award — the highest American honor in medallic art, given by the American Numismatic Society — in 1950.

Her method set her apart. Rather than sketch an animal from memory, she insisted on the real thing in front of her. The U.S. Mint twice handed her a commemorative half dollar in the 1930s, and both times she went hunting for a live model. The results show it. The beaver on the Albany coin and the calf on the New Rochelle coin both have the slightly awkward, specific weight of a real animal — not a heraldic symbol, but a creature.

Beyond coins, her sculptures and medals entered major collections. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds her 1938 Conserve Wild Life medal, made for the Society of Medalists — fitting work for an artist who spent her life looking hard at animals. In 1954 she moved with her sister Dorothy to Falls Village, Connecticut, where she lived and worked until her death on March 16, 1986, at age 89.

Lathrop's reputation as a coin designer rests on two silver half dollars struck two years apart.

The Albany Charter half dollar of 1936 marked the 250th anniversary of the city's 1686 charter. Lathrop put a beaver — gnawing a maple branch — on the front, a nod to the fur trade that built Albany and to the animal on the city's seal. To get it right, she had New York's Conservation Department lend her a live beaver to model. The other side shows three historical figures around the charter, with an eagle spread above them. Congress authorized 25,000 coins; the Philadelphia Mint struck 25,013. Demand was weak at the $2 price, and over 7,000 were eventually returned and melted, leaving roughly 17,600.

The New Rochelle 250th Anniversary half dollar — dated 1938, though struck in 1937 — came to her because the Albany coin had been so well received. It commemorates a genuinely odd piece of history: when John Pell sold the land in 1689, the deal required the new settlers to hand over "one fatt calfe" every June 24 if Pell's heirs ever asked, or forfeit the land. Lathrop made that calf the star of the coin, modeling it from a Guernsey borrowed from an Albany farm, with a figure leading it. The reverse carries a fleur-de-lis, drawn from the arms of La Rochelle, France — the city the Huguenot founders left behind. About 15,000 of the roughly 25,000 struck were sold; the rest were melted.