Constance Ortmayer

Constance Ortmayer was born in New York City on July 19, 1902, the daughter of Rudolph Joseph Ortmayer, a lithographer, and Mildred Cerny Ortmayer. Her father made images for a living, and the household pointed her toward art early. But she did not learn her craft at home. She learned it in Vienna.

In 1927 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, then continued at its Master School of Arts from 1930 to 1932, studying under the Austrian sculptor Josef Müllner — eventually teaching there herself and earning the equivalent of a master's degree. She toured the art capitals of Austria, Germany, France, Italy, England, and Scandinavia. That is a serious old-world education in stone and bronze, the kind of figure-modeling apprenticeship most American coin designers of her era never had.

She came home around 1932 into the worst of the Great Depression, when sculpture commissions had all but vanished. So she went to work for the government instead. Through a friend who tutored Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., she joined the Section of Painting and Sculpture — the New Deal office that ran competitions to put art in federal buildings. Her job, at first, was running those contests for other artists. The coin that made her name came while she sat at that federal desk.

Ortmayer was a figure sculptor first and a coin designer almost by accident. Her medium was relief — the shallow, carved-back sculpture you read with raking light, where a whole scene has to live inside a few millimeters of depth. That is exactly what a coin demands. The obverse (the heads side) and the reverse (the tails side) are relief sculptures shrunk to the width of a thumbnail.

You can see the skill in her New Deal work. In 1939 she carved a plaster relief titled Arcadia for the post office in Arcadia, Florida — figures, a cow and calf, a whole rural tableau pressed flat. The next year she finished Alabama Agriculture, a three-panel relief for the post office in Scottsboro, Alabama, walking a crop from field to harvest. Both came out of national competitions she had once helped administer from the other side of the table.

In 1937 she left the federal Section and Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida hired her to teach — recruited by its president, Hamilton Holt. She climbed every rung: instructor, then assistant professor (1941), associate (1944), full professor of sculpture (1947), staying until she retired in 1968. She never married. Along the way she won the Anna Hyatt Huntington Prize for a work called Aprilis and the Henry O. Avery Architectural Prize for The Bather, joined the National Sculpture Society, and became known for portrait medals — many of them of Rollins's own faculty. A medal, like a coin, is relief in miniature. She spent a career in that compressed, demanding scale.

The 1936 Cincinnati Music Center half dollar is the reason collectors know Ortmayer's name. It is also one of the most quietly dubious commemoratives the United States ever issued — and the dubious part was not her doing.

A Cincinnati businessman named Thomas G. Melish, heir to the Bromwell Wire Company fortune, formed a "Cincinnati Musical Center Commemorative Coin Association," got Congress to authorize a coin in 1936 marking fifty years of Cincinnati as "a music center of America," and then bought up the entire authorized mintage himself to resell. The trouble was the math. The reverse is dated 1886, but Cincinnati's reputation as a music city is usually traced to its May Festival, which began in 1873. Fifty years before 1936 lands on no event anyone has been able to name. The anniversary was, in plain terms, a pretext to sell coins.

It got stranger on the obverse, where Ortmayer placed a bust of the songwriter Stephen Foster, captioned "STEPHEN FOSTER — AMERICA'S TROUBADOUR," her initials tucked at his neck. Foster did live in Cincinnati once — from 1846 to 1850 he kept books for his brother's steamboat agency, and published some of his earliest songs there. But he died in 1864, decades before the supposed milestone, and his real fame came elsewhere. The federal Commission of Fine Arts objected. Its chairman, Charles Moore, wrote that the commission was "at a loss to connect a fiftieth anniversary in 1936 with a movement that began in 1873," and recommended the conductor Theodore Thomas, who actually built Cincinnati's musical institutions, instead. Melish controlled distribution and overruled them. Foster stayed.

Her reverse is the better half of the coin: a kneeling allegorical figure of Music, holding a lyre, flanked by the dates 1886 and 1936. It is calm, classical, and genuinely well modeled — the work of someone who had spent years carving figures in relief. The scheme around it was a hustle. The sculpture on it was real.

Here is the twist that keeps the Cincinnati half dollar valuable: Melish made it scarce on purpose. Only 15,000 coins reached the public across three mints — 5,005 from Philadelphia, 5,005 from Denver, and 5,006 from San Francisco, the extra few set aside for assay (the mint mark, a small D or S on the reverse, shows where each was struck). He bundled them into three-coin sets at $7.75 and, collectors believe, held many back while claiming they had sold out.

The price spiked to about $40 within months, then sagged when the 1936 commemorative bubble burst — down toward $15 by year's end. Decades later it climbed back: roughly $100 in the early 1960s, $550 by 1975, around $2,250 by 1980. Today a complete set runs well into four figures depending on grade. Melish earned lasting scorn from numismatists for the manufactured scarcity. Collectors bought it anyway, and still do. The greed and the artistry sit on the same small silver disc — which is precisely why the coin, and Ortmayer's name with it, refuses to be forgotten.