Bart Forbes

Bart Forbes was born on July 3, 1939, in Altus, Oklahoma, into an Air Force family that moved often. His father took him to major-league ballgames — Wrigley Field, Crosley Field — and the sport-watching never left him. It became the subject of a lifetime's work.

He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1961, then studied further at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. After a short stint in the U.S. Army, he settled in Dallas in 1967 and built a national career without ever moving to New York — unusual in a field that then ran straight through Manhattan.

His paintings filled Time, Sports Illustrated, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, and Golf Digest. Corporate and broadcast clients followed — NBC, ABC, the NFL, Exxon, General Electric. But sport was always the heart of it: the Boston and New York marathons, the Kentucky Derby, the Indianapolis 500, the America's Cup, PGA tournaments. In 1986 the American Sport Art Museum and Archives named him its Sport Artist of the Year, and in 2017 the Society of Illustrators inducted him into its Hall of Fame.

Forbes paints athletes the way a fan remembers them — not posed, but mid-motion. His style is loose and painterly yet still resolves into a recognizable figure: a runner's strain, a rower's pull, the blur of a fastball. He came up the hard way for an illustrator, starting on album covers and paperback book jackets before sport became his signature.

That instinct made him a natural for the Olympic movement. In 1987 the Korean Olympic Committee named him the official artist for the 1988 Seoul Summer Games — work that produced 26 canvases and sealed his reputation. He went on to make official Olympic art for the U.S. Olympic Committee at the 1992 Barcelona and 1996 Atlanta Games. Three Olympiads in a row is a rare run for any one artist.

He also designed more than twenty commemorative U.S. postage stamps, honoring figures from Lou Gehrig to Jesse Owens. So when the U.S. Mint needed a rower for the Atlanta program, it was hiring someone who already knew how to compress an athlete into a small, official rectangle of paper — and could do the same on a disc of metal.

A coin asks something a painting does not, though. A stamp prints in full color; a coin is struck — pressed from an engraved steel die — in a single tone, with depth carried only by relief, the height the design rises off the flat field. Forbes supplied the obverse design — the heads side — and the Mint's engraving staff translated his four-man crew into the low, readable relief a coin demands. The reverse, shared across the 1996 Olympic silver dollars, came from Mint sculptor-engraver Thomas D. Rogers, Sr.

The 1996 Atlanta rowing dollar was one small piece of the largest commemorative coin program the U.S. had ever attempted. To mark the centennial of the modern Olympic Games, the Mint issued sixteen coins across 1995 and 1996 — four clad half dollars, eight silver dollars, and four gold five-dollar pieces — and sold roughly 2.4 million of them in all.

Forbes' contribution is the one collectors picture first: four men rowing in unison beneath the five Olympic rings, the whole crew caught in a single forward stroke. It is a painter's composition more than an engraver's — rhythm and motion where another designer might have given you a static portrait.

It is also genuinely scarce in one form. The proof version, struck at Philadelphia, reached 151,890 coins. The uncirculated version, struck at Denver, stopped at just 16,258 — a tiny figure for a modern U.S. coin, and the reason the Denver rowing dollar is the one most chased today.