Joseph A. Bailly

Joseph Alexis Bailly was born in Paris around 1823, the son of a cabinetmaker, and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts — the most prestigious art school in France. Then the Revolution of 1848 swept him up. Drafted into the army, he struck an officer, deserted, and fled the country.

That flight became a career. He passed through England, the United States, and Argentina before settling in Philadelphia around 1850. He started where his father had left off — carving furniture and wood — and worked his way up to bronze portrait busts and full-size public statues.

By 1860 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had named him an Academician, its highest honor for an artist. His best-known work is the marble George Washington he completed in 1869, which stood — and in bronze replica still stands — outside Independence Hall, in the very city where the country was founded. A giant Benjamin Franklin (1868) and a Washington, D.C. statue of Civil War general John A. Rawlins followed. Bailly died in Philadelphia in 1883.

Bailly was a sculptor, not a coin engraver — and that matters. A statue is built up in clay and carved large; a coin die is cut in reverse, in steel, at the size of a fingernail. They are different trades. But in the 1870s the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, looking for fresh ideas, turned to outside artists, and Bailly was right there in the city.

He took two swings at a circulating coin. In 1873 he designed the obverse — the heads side — of a pattern for the new Trade Dollar: a seated Liberty resting her hand on a globe, ringed by cotton, tobacco, and wheat, the crops of American export. (A pattern is a trial coin struck to test a design before it's approved.) The Mint chose someone else's design instead.

The next year he tried again, on the twenty-cent piece. He drew another seated Liberty for the obverse; chief engraver William Barber supplied the reverse. Mint superintendent James Pollock killed it for a practical reason: it looked too much like the Seated Liberty quarter already in every pocket. A new coin that you couldn't tell from an old one was a problem, not a feature — the very confusion that would doom the twenty-cent piece once it did circulate. Bailly's Liberty never went into mass production. Today his patterns survive only as rarities collectors prize precisely because they were the road not taken.