John Howard Benson

John Howard Benson did something few coin designers ever did: he made his living with a chisel and a slab of stone.

He was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on July 6, 1901, and he never really left. He studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York, training as a printmaker and painter. But the old slate gravestones in Newport's burying grounds pulled at him — the deep-cut, hand-drawn letters of colonial carvers — and he turned toward stone.

In 1927 he bought the John Stevens Shop on Thames Street, a letter-carving business founded in 1705 and already one of the oldest continuously running shops in America. Benson didn't just keep it alive. He made it the center of a craft revival, cutting inscriptions by hand at a moment when the rest of the trade had gone to machines and sandblasting. The shop is still carving today, run by his descendants.

Benson's real subject was the letter itself. He was a calligrapher as much as a carver — he believed the carved letter and the written letter were the same problem solved in two materials, and he taught both.

From 1931 until his death he taught sculpture, calligraphy, and design theory at the Rhode Island School of Design, just up the bay in Providence. He wrote the books that carried his thinking past his own students: The Elements of Lettering (1940, with Arthur Graham Carey) and The First Writing Book (1955), his English translation and facsimile of a 16th-century Italian manual — the first printed guide to the elegant italic "chancery" hand. Generations of letterers learned from both.

His chisel reached far beyond Newport. He carved for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the Groton School, and designed RISD's own seal and diploma. He is also credited with the inscriptions on the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington — the Iwo Jima statue — dedicated the year before his death.

The coin grew out of this same hand. When the Rhode Island Tercentenary needed a designer in 1935, RISD's Royal B. Farnum handed the job to Benson and Carey for a plain reason: the two men had already cut dies for small medals. A coin die, after all, is just lettering and relief carved into metal — Benson's day job, shrunk to the size of a thumbnail.