Harry Cochrane

Most people credited on a U.S. coin trained at an art academy or worked inside the Mint. Harry Cochrane did neither. He was a small-town artist from Monmouth, Maine — and almost everything he knew, he taught himself.

Born in 1860 and raised by his grandparents in Monmouth, Cochrane started drawing as a boy. The spark, the story goes, came when a traveling fresco painter arrived to decorate a local church. He was painting portraits by 18 and decorating his first church by 27, and he never really stopped. Over a working life that ran into the 1940s he is said to have decorated more than 150 churches and lodge halls across New England and New York.

That range earned him nicknames. Locals called him "the Maine Leonardo" and the "Michelangelo of Maine" — affectionate exaggeration for a man who was, all at once, a painter, an architect, a writer, and a musician who led bands and composed his own pieces. He died in 1946, at 86.

Cochrane worked big. His signature was the mural — vast painted ceilings and walls, done in a grand decorative style, on the kind of public interiors a town gathers in: churches, Masonic lodges, theaters, courthouses.

His masterpiece is Cumston Hall in Monmouth, finished in 1900. He didn't just paint it — he designed the building itself, an ornate town hall and opera house, and then covered its interior with his own murals. It still stands and still hosts performances. He also wrote a two-volume History of Monmouth and Wales (1894), the kind of project that tells you how deep his roots ran in one place.

So when Maine planned its 100th-birthday coin in 1920, the state turned to its most celebrated homegrown artist. Cochrane supplied the drawings — the original sketch of what the coin should show. But a drawing is not a coin. Turning a flat design into the shallow, three-dimensional relief — the raised sculpture you can feel on a coin's surface — is a specialist's job, and it went to the sculptor Anthony de Francisci, who would design the famous Peace dollar the very next year. De Francisci converted Cochrane's sketches into the plaster models the Philadelphia Mint used to cut its dies.

The handoff wasn't smooth. The federal Commission of Fine Arts, which reviews coin and monument designs, disliked the proposal and pushed for changes; its chairman warned it "would bring humiliation to the people of Maine." Maine's officials brushed the criticism aside and insisted on their artist's concept. The coin went out the way the state wanted it.