Barbara Fox

If you have ever spent a New Jersey quarter from 2017, you have held a Barbara Fox drawing. On the back is an immigrant family approaching Ellis Island — luggage in hand, faces caught between hope and fear. Most people who pocketed that coin never learned the name of the artist who imagined it.

Fox is a painter first, a coin designer second. She works in watercolor and oil out of a studio in Ellicottville, in the green hills of Cattaraugus County, New York, near her home in Little Valley. Her paintings are meticulous realist scenes — figures, flowers, quiet interiors — built up the way the Dutch masters worked: a careful drawing, then layer after thin layer of glaze until the colors glow. She is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society and the International Guild of Realism, teaches watercolor workshops around the country, and has done commercial illustration for American Greetings, Timex, and Disney.

Then, in 2007, the U.S. Mint invited her into its Artistic Infusion Program — a roster of outside American artists the Mint commissions to design coins and medals. She was not a Mint employee cutting steel; she was the designer, the one who decides what a coin should show and how it should feel. Over the next dozen years she rose to the Mint's top rank, Master Designer, and saw more than twenty of her designs struck into circulating coins, commemoratives, and medals. "I love designing for the Mint," she has said, "and the people I work with there are wonderful."

A U.S. coin is usually made by two hands, not one. A designer like Fox draws the idea. Then a Mint sculptor-engraver turns that flat drawing into a three-dimensional model and, finally, into the die — the hardened steel stamp that strikes the blank metal. That is why most of Fox's coins carry two sets of initials: hers as designer, and the engraver's. The painter never touches the steel.

That division suited her, because what she brought was a painter's instinct for feeling. Her own artist statement applies just as well to her coins: "I crave beauty, peace, and order." The Mint, in turn, praised her "sensitive and naturalistic portrayals of people and nature." She liked to fold a small human moment into a large public subject — and the Ellis Island quarter is the clearest proof.

She did real homework for it. "When I began researching," she has said, "I didn't know that half of Ellis Island belongs to New Jersey and half to New York." That detail became the design's quiet joke and its anchor: the coin honors New Jersey, so she set the Ellis Island hospital — the part of the complex on the New Jersey side — in the background, behind a family stepping off the boat. "These people were leaving everything they knew behind," she said. "They used to call Ellis Island the 'Island of Hope' and the 'Island of Tears.'" Both feelings are on the coin at once.

The same patience runs through her landscapes. Of the America the Beautiful quarters — the program that put a different national park or monument on the reverse five times a year — Fox designed five reverses: Glacier (2011), Acadia (2012), Saratoga (2015), Cumberland Gap (2016), and Ellis Island (2017). She also worked on Code Talkers Congressional Gold Medals and the First Spouse gold program. Wherever she went, she rendered the scene like a watercolorist: unhurried, observed, calm.

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Four of Fox's commemorative designs are catalogued here, and together they show her range — from a portrait of childhood to a soldier's lamp.

On the 2013 Girl Scouts of the USA Centennial silver dollar, she designed the obverse — the heads side. Three girls of different ages stand together, ringed by the words Courage · Confidence · Character and the Girl Scout trefoil. Mint sculptor-engraver Phebe Hemphill modeled it into steel.

The 2016 National Park Service Centennial half dollar carries one of her warmest scenes on its obverse: a hiker taking in the wilderness while, lower down, a small child crouches to discover a frog hidden in the ferns. Michael Gaudioso sculpted it.

And on both the 2013 Five-Star Generals $5 gold coin and silver dollar, Fox designed the reverse — the same emblem on both: the Leavenworth Lamp, the symbol of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Joseph Menna sculpted both reverses. The portrait obverses — MacArthur on the gold, Marshall and Eisenhower on the dollar — were designed by other Artistic Infusion artists. One coin, more than one hand.