Henry Kreis

Henry Godfrey Kreis was born in Essen, Germany, on July 27, 1899, into the kind of trade that puts a chisel in your hand early. After high school he apprenticed to a stone carver, then studied at the State School of Applied Arts in Munich. Stone was the language he learned first — and it stayed his language for life.

He came to the United States in 1922 and, at first, did exactly what he'd been trained to do: he cut stone for a living. But he kept studying. He enrolled at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York, and he fell in with Paul Manship — the sculptor whose sleek, modern figures (the gilded Prometheus at Rockefeller Center is his) were redefining American sculpture. The two became lifelong friends, and Manship's clean, stylized line shows up in everything Kreis later touched.

Kreis settled in Connecticut and taught at the Hartford Art School. During the Depression he worked as a Public Works of Art artist — one of the thousands of sculptors and painters the federal government put to work when private commissions dried up. That detail matters more than it sounds, because it's exactly how he ended up designing coins.

In the 1930s a wave of commemorative half dollars — special coins struck to mark a town's anniversary or a historic event — gave sculptors a rare canvas: a real U.S. coin, in real silver, in real pockets. Kreis got three of them.

His first, the 1935 Connecticut Tercentenary half dollar, is his masterpiece. The obverse — the heads side — is just a tree: the Charter Oak, the hollow oak where, by legend, colonists hid Connecticut's royal charter from an English governor who'd come to seize it. No portrait, no allegory, just a single gnarled tree carrying three centuries of a state's identity. It works because Kreis trusted the image to be enough.

The reverse carried an eagle, and here the trouble started. The design went before the Commission of Fine Arts — the body that vets U.S. coin art — where the sculptor Lee Lawrie complained that Kreis's bird looked more like a hawk and that his thirteen stars were too faint. The models were approved with revisions anyway. (There was a legal wrinkle, too: because the work was a federal relief project, the Commission technically wasn't supposed to be paying for the design at all.)

Then came the 1936 Bridgeport, Connecticut, Centennial half dollar, and with it Kreis's boldest swing. The obverse is a crisp bust of P. T. Barnum — the showman, who had been Bridgeport's mayor and is buried there, the only circus impresario ever portrayed on U.S. money. The reverse eagle was pure Art Deco: angular, streamlined, stripped to geometry. One art historian called it the most modernistic eagle ever seen on a coin. The dealer B. Max Mehl was less kind — he said it looked like an airplane, or a shark with two dorsal fins. Both men were describing the same thing: an artist pushing the national bird somewhere it had never been.

Kreis's third coin was quieter. For the 1936 Arkansas–Robinson half dollar he supplied a new obverse portrait of Senator Joseph T. Robinson; the reverse was an existing eagle-and-flag design by Edward E. Burr, carried over from the earlier Arkansas Centennial issue. It's the rare living-person portrait on a 1930s commemorative — and a reminder that not every coin is a fight over an eagle.

Beyond coins, Kreis worked in medals and architectural sculpture. He designed the Society of Medalists' 1947 Wise and Foolish Virgins issue, and in 1948 the American Numismatic Society gave him its J. Sanford Saltus Award, the field's highest honor for medallic art.