Edward Everett Burr

For most of his life, Edward Everett Burr drew cars for a living. Working in Chicago's advertising trade in the late 1920s, he rendered the gleaming automobiles in magazine ads — and he modeled the figural radiator caps that crowned Cadillacs and LaSalles. It is a strange path to a United States coin, and yet that is exactly where it led.

He was born in Warren County, Ohio, on January 18, 1895, the son of George and Virginia Burr. His father was an Ohio lawyer who moved the family to Paragould, in northeastern Arkansas, in 1905; years later he changed careers entirely and was ordained a Methodist minister, riding circuits through the small towns of northern and western Arkansas. The state took Burr in as one of its own — and that adopted-son status is part of why, decades on, Arkansas asked him to design its coin.

In the 1920s Burr studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, under two teachers who pulled him in opposite directions: Leopold Seyffert, a fashionable society portrait painter, and Albin Polasek, a rigorous academic sculptor. The pairing fit him. Burr spent his career working both sides of the line — turning out commercial art and architectural renderings that paid the bills, while exhibiting paintings and sculpture in the galleries. He was a working artist of the Depression era, equal parts adman and craftsman.

Burr's single brush with American coinage was also the hardest job of his life. Congress authorized a half dollar for Arkansas's 1936 statehood centennial by an act of May 14, 1934, and Burr won the competition to design it. Winning, it turned out, was the easy part.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts — the federal panel that vets the look of the nation's coins, medals, and monuments — rejected his sketch. On July 27, 1934, the commission's Charles Moore wrote to the acting director of the Mint that Burr's design was unsuitable for a coin of the United States. Burr did not walk away. Arkansas's senator Hattie Caraway — the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate — took up his case, and the commission agreed to keep working with him. Its member Lee Lawrie, himself one of America's foremost architectural sculptors, suggested the fix: pull the two portraits out of a flat, frontal stare and turn them into the overlapping profiles you see on the coin today. Final approval came in March 1935 — more than a year and a half after the contest closed.

The design splits a century into two faces. One side carries portraits: a Native American chief dated 1836, the year Arkansas joined the Union, paired with a modern woman in a Phrygian liberty cap dated 1936 — a hundred years compressed into two heads looking the same way. The other side is dominated by a spread-winged eagle over a rayed sun, with the diamond and stars of the Arkansas state flag worked into the field. (The diamond is no accident: Arkansas held the only diamond mine then known in the United States.) Sources even disagree on which side is the obverse — the "heads" side — because the portraits sit opposite the denomination; it is a genuine quirk of the coin.

Burr drew the design, but he did not cut the dies. A second Arkansas artist, Emily Bates, sculpted the finished plaster models the Mint engravers worked from — and she did it in the Chicago studio of Lorado Taft, one of the most celebrated American sculptors of the age. It was a hand-off worthy of the coin's pedigree.

Burr's eagle outlived its first job. In 1937, a new half dollar was struck to honor Senator Joseph T. Robinson, and rather than start over, the Mint kept Burr's eagle reverse and added a fresh portrait of Robinson by the sculptor Henry Kreis. The result is one of the rarest things in U.S. coinage: a living person on a federal coin. Robinson was still serving in the Senate when the coins were struck — he died on July 14, 1937 — making him only the fourth living American ever to appear on the country's money. Burr's eagle is the thread that ties the two coins together.