Walter H. Rich

Walter Herbert Rich was a Maine naturalist who happened, once, to design a coin.

Born in 1866, he was largely self-taught — he started drawing and painting as a child and never stopped. His real subjects were alive: the gamebirds of the Northeast, the salmon and groundfish of New England waters, the cold marine world he knew firsthand. He worked in watercolor and gouache, and his eye was a field naturalist's eye, trained by close looking rather than by an art academy.

He earned his living from that knowledge. From 1913 until 1936 he served as an agent for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Portland, Maine, and he became curator of the museum of the Portland Society of Natural History. He also wrote and illustrated his own books — Feathered Game of the Northeast (1907), a 432-page volume he both authored and filled with more than 80 bird illustrations, and the government report Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine (1929). A reviewer in The Nation in 1907 praised him for being "not only the student and collector of the material for which he writes, but the artist as well."

That last line is the key to him. Rich was a man who studied a thing and then drew it. The coin was the one time that habit collided with the United States Mint.

In 1936 the committee planning York County, Maine's 300th anniversary needed a commemorative half dollar, and they turned to a local artist they trusted: Walter H. Rich. He was the obvious choice in Portland — a known painter and naturalist — but he was a stranger to the discipline of coin design, where a picture has to read in low relief, in metal, at the size of a coin.

He worked from what was at hand. One side he based on a sketch of Brown's Garrison — the fortified house around which the county had formed — taken from Frank C. Deering's 1931 book The Proprietors of Saco. The other side he drew from York County's official seal, with its cross and pine tree. The federal Commission of Fine Arts, which reviews U.S. coin designs, approved the work with minor changes to the lettering.

Then came an unusual step. Rich's designs were sculpted not in the usual plaster but in brass, by the G. S. Pacetti Company of Boston — what the numismatist Walter P. Nichols called the first time models had been made in brass for a U.S. coin. The Medallic Art Company of New York reduced those models into the working dies that struck the coin. (A die is the engraved steel stamp that presses the image into the blank; relief is how far the design rises from the field.)

The result divided opinion, and still does. Some writers were blunt. Don Taxay panned the "amateurish rendering of Brown's Garrison" and a "tedious background." The dealer B. Max Mehl shrugged that "the design reminds me more of a medal than coin." The art historian Cornelius Vermeule was harshest of all, writing that "few [coins] have deserved ashes and odium more than this." Others defended it: William F. Sheehan argued that the broad, flat rims deliberately echoed the look of colonial Massachusetts coinage. Either way, the flatness that critics noticed fits a designer thinking like an illustrator, not a sculptor — and a single coin's worth of practice at it.