Robert Ball Hughes: the sculptor who redrew Liberty

Robert Ball Hughes was modeling masterworks before most boys could be trusted with a pocketknife. The story handed down is that at twelve he shaped a small relief — a scene of the wisdom of Solomon — out of melted candle ends, and that it was good enough to be cast in silver. Whether or not every detail of that tale survives scrutiny, the talent it points to was real.

He was born in London on 19 January 1804 — some older sources say 1806 — and trained for seven years under Edward Hodges Baily, one of the most sought-after British sculptors of the age. At the Royal Academy the young Hughes collected medals, modeling careful copies of famous antique statues and, eventually, work of his own.

Then, around 1829, he did the unlikely thing: he left a thriving art world for a young country that had almost none. America in 1829 had no sculpture schools, no foundries equal to Europe's, barely a market. Hughes arrived in New York and started building the thing he wanted to belong to.

The commissions came fast. A high-relief marble memorial to Bishop John Henry Hobart for Trinity Church in New York. A statue of Governor DeWitt Clinton. A statue of Alexander Hamilton — the first life-size marble figure carved in the United States — set inside New York's Merchants' Exchange. That Hamilton burned in the Great Fire of New York in 1835, a heartbreak for any sculptor. Hughes moved on, to Philadelphia and then to the Boston area, where he settled for good.

Hughes belonged to the first generation of sculptors who tried to do everything in America that Europe already did — and to do it here, with American hands and American metal. His signature achievement was technical as much as artistic: a seated bronze figure of the mathematician and navigator Nathaniel Bowditch. He finished the model in 1843, and in 1847 it was cast and installed at Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is generally called the first large bronze statue cast in the United States — a quiet milestone in a country still learning to pour its own monuments.

That range — monument to miniature — is what made him useful to the Mint. A coin design is sculpture in the hardest medium there is: a relief (a raised image) only fractions of a millimeter high, that has to read clearly when struck a million times into hard metal. The Mint did not need a portraitist. It needed someone who understood how cloth falls, how a body sits, how a figure holds together at the size of a thumbnail. Hughes had spent his life on exactly that.

His final years turned, sadly, in the other direction. He took up pyrography — drawing with a heated iron, scorching images into wood, so-called "poker pictures." He made striking ones: The Witches of Macbeth, Don Quixote in His Study, a scene of General Grant proclaiming the surrender of Richmond. But he made many of them for small returns, a celebrated sculptor reduced to selling burnt-wood pictures. He died near Boston in 1868 and is buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Here is the thing collectors come to this page for. Hughes did not create the Seated Liberty coins. That design was Christian Gobrecht's — a graceful figure of Liberty seated on a rock, holding a shield and a liberty pole, first struck in the late 1830s. What Hughes did was retouch it.

In late 1840, Mint Director Robert Maskell Patterson hired Hughes — by then known as a miniaturist as well as a sculptor — to "improve" Gobrecht's figure. Hughes filled out Liberty's somewhat thin form, shrank the draped chair behind her, repositioned the shield, and reworked the banner and lettering. But the change everyone remembers is a single piece of cloth: he added drapery flowing from Liberty's left elbow down across her knee.

That one fold did something no one fully intended. It gave collectors a clean, visible line between the coins struck before the change and the coins struck after. The earlier figure is the "No Drapery" type; Hughes's reworked figure is the "Drapery" type. Because the switch happened mid-1840, the year 1840 itself exists in both forms — which is exactly the kind of seam that makes a series fun to collect.

The retouch did not land evenly across the silver coins. It shows up most clearly on the half dime and the dime, somewhat less on the quarter, while the half dollar kept most of Gobrecht's original look. So when colcur credits Hughes on the Seated Liberty dime, half dime, and quarter, that is the credit: not the invention of the design, but the 1840 hand that reshaped it — the version that then ran, with later adjustments, for half a century.

Was it an improvement? Numismatists still argue. Some find Hughes's Liberty fuller and more finished; others think the original was more elegant and that the "improvements" stiffened it. That argument is itself the point. A small, contested change by a sculptor most people have never heard of is why the Seated Liberty series has one of the most-watched variety splits in American coinage.