Susan Gamble

For most of American history, the people who designed the nation's coins worked inside the Mint — staff sculptors, hired and trained, hunched over plaster in Philadelphia. Susan Gamble was not one of them. She was a graphic designer and illustrator from Virginia who, in 2004, answered an open call.

That call was the Artistic Infusion Program — the Mint's then-new effort to bring outside artists into coin design, to shake fresh blood into a century-old craft. Gamble was one of the first artists chosen. Within a few years she would be named a Master Designer, the program's senior rank, and her work would win one of the highest honors in world numismatics.

She was born in 1957 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up in Danville. She earned a fine arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978, then built a career as a designer and illustrator — more than thirty years of it — while moving often as the wife of an Air Force officer. Along the way she painted official-style portraits of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and did work for the National Park Foundation. She was painting presidents long before she ever sculpted one's spouse in relief.

Gamble died on January 14, 2015, at 57, in New Braunfels, Texas, after living for years with both diabetes and breast cancer. She left behind nearly two dozen adopted coin and medal designs — a body of work that, coin for coin, is one of the most prolific of any modern American designer.

A coin gives an artist a circle the width of a fingernail and almost no depth. Gamble's gift was narrative inside that tiny frame — she didn't just put a face on metal, she staged a scene.

Take her best-known work: the reverse — the tails side — of the 2007 Jamestown 400th Anniversary silver dollar. It earned the international Coin of the Year Award for Historical Significance, the closest thing the coin world has to an Oscar. Don Everhart, the Mint sculptor who would later turn many of her drawings into finished relief, and former Chief Engraver John Mercanti both singled it out as a standout of her career.

Her method reflects how the Artistic Infusion Program works. An outside artist like Gamble produced the design — the drawing, the composition, the idea — and a Mint sculptor-engraver translated it into the three-dimensional model that becomes the die. On the Martha Washington First Spouse coin, for instance, Gamble drew the scene and Everhart sculpted it. The pairing shows up again and again across her output.

What ran through nearly all of it was a steady, classical hand and a love of the human moment. Joel Iskowitz, a fellow designer, called her obverse for the 2008 Bald Eagle gold five-dollar coin one of the most beautiful designs in American coinage. Her range was enormous: state quarters, presidential dollars, the Lincoln Bicentennial cent reverse, a platinum eagle, national-park quarters, and congressional gold medals. But it was a single ten-year project that defined her.

In 2007 the Mint launched the First Spouse gold coin series — a half-ounce of 24-karat gold honoring each First Lady, struck alongside the Presidential dollar that bore her husband. (For presidents who served without a wife, a figure of Liberty stood in.) The obverse — the heads side — carried the First Lady's portrait; the reverse told a scene from her life. It was tailor-made for an artist who thought in stories. Susan Gamble would design more of these coins than almost anyone.

The very first coin in the series carried her work. Its reverse shows Martha Washington sewing a button onto her husband's uniform — a quiet nod to the future First Lady who wintered at Valley Forge, mended soldiers' coats, and earned the Continental Army's lasting devotion. From there, across the program's run, Gamble's hand appears on seven First Spouse coins in all — sometimes the obverse portrait, sometimes the reverse scene:

• Martha Washington (2007) — reverse
• Louisa Adams (2008) — obverse
• Letitia Tyler (2009) — reverse
• Abigail Fillmore (2010) — reverse
• Lucy Hayes (2011) — obverse
• Alice Paul (2012) — obverse
• Ida McKinley (2013) — obverse

The program ran ten years and ended in 2016. By then Gamble was gone — but she had helped open it, and her name sits on more of its coins than most.