Augustus Saint-Gaudens: United States Coin Designs

Ten Dollar Gold Coins by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Twenty Dollar Gold Coins by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

"After the erection of the new studio on the spot where the old one had burned, my father turned not only to the reconstruction of the statues which he had lost, but before long to a monument to Marcus A. Hanna, memorials to Christopher Lyman Magee and James MacNeill Whistler, the Caryatids for the Albright Art Gallery, the United States coins, and other commissions.

The scheme for the United States coins - the cent, the eagle, and the double eagle - also originated about this time at a dinner with President Roosevelt in the winter of 1905. There they both grew enthusiastic over the old high-relief Greek coins, until the President declared that he would have the mint stamp a modern version of such coins in spite of itself if my father would design them, adding with his customary vehemence, 'You know, Saint-Gaudens, this is my pet crime.' Saint-Gaudens wrote Roosevelt, 'The making of these designs is a great pleasure, but the job is even more serious than I anticipated. You may not recall that I told you I was 'scared blue' at the thought of doing that; now that I have the opportunity, the responsibility looms up like a spectre.'

He first purposed to model the cent with a flying eagle, the formal lettering treated in a new fashion, and to execute for the gold coins a full-length figure of Liberty mounting a rock, with a shield in her left hand and a lighted torch in her right, backed by a semi-conventional eagle, with wings half-closed. For one reason and another, however, the scheme proved impracticable. So after months of confusion, he settled that the one cent would exhibit a profile head and the lettering; that the ten-dollar gold piece should carry the same head, with the inscriptions shifted, and the standing eagle; and that the twenty-dollar gold piece should exhibit the full-length figure of Liberty, without wings or shield, and the flying eagle.

To accomplish this result, my father altered and realtered the coins for a year and a half. The flying eagle he developed from the bird on the 1857 'White Cent.' In all, he created seventy models of this bird, and often stood twenty-five of them in a row for visitors to number according to preference.

The profile head he modeled in relief from the favorite, but superseded but of the Sherman 'Victory,' adding feathers only upon the President's emphatic suggestion. 

Finally he attached the difficult problem of the inscriptions by placing upon the previously milled edge of the coin, in one case, the forty-six stars and, in the other, the thirteen stars with the 'E Pluribus Unum.' The motto 'In God We Trust,' as an inartistic intrusion not required by law, he wholly discarded and thereby drew down upon himself the lightning of public comment. It is interesting to discover in regard to this that Secretary Salmon P. Chase received quite as severe a censure for placing the words upon this coin as was aroused by their removal." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)