Paul Wayland Bartlett

Paul Wayland Bartlett spent most of his life in Paris, but his hands shaped some of the most American monuments there are — the pediment over the House of Representatives, statues inside the Library of Congress, and a general on horseback that still stands near the Louvre.

He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 24, 1865, the son of the sculptor and art critic Truman Howe Bartlett. The family moved to France when Paul was a boy. He was a prodigy: he exhibited at the Paris Salon as a teenager and entered the École des Beaux-Arts — France's elite art school — at about fifteen. There he learned to model animals from life in the city's zoo, the Jardin des Plantes, studying under the celebrated animal sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet.

That training showed. His early hit, the Bohemian Bear Tamer (now in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art), and his Ghost Dancer won praise for their anatomy — the tense, true musculature of a body and a beast. France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor while he was still in his twenties. He died in Paris on September 20, 1925, at sixty.

Bartlett's link to American coinage runs through one statue. In the 1890s a national committee set out to honor the Marquis de Lafayette — the French nobleman who fought for American independence — with a monument in Paris, paid for in part by coins collected from U.S. schoolchildren. Bartlett got the commission to sculpt it: Lafayette on horseback, sword raised.

To raise money, Congress authorized a souvenir coin. That coin became the 1900 Lafayette dollar — the first silver commemorative dollar the United States ever struck. Here is the part collectors should keep straight: Bartlett did not engrave the coin. The Mint's Chief Engraver, Charles E. Barber, designed both sides and cut the dies. But the reverse — the "tails" side — is Bartlett's monument, copied from an early model of his statue. Barber even put Bartlett's name on the base of the sculpted horse, right there on the coin. So Bartlett is the sculptor behind the design, not the engraver of the metal — a distinction that comes up often with monument-based coinage.

His real masterworks were architectural in scale. From 1908 to 1916 he carved Apotheosis of Democracy, the marble pediment over the U.S. Capitol's House wing — a sculpted scene set into the triangular gable above the entrance. Inside the Library of Congress stand his bronze figures of Michelangelo and Columbus. He worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition: grand, allegorical, anatomically exact. The Lafayette dollar carries a small, struck echo of all of it.