Emily Bates

Emily Bates is one of those names that survives on the strength of a single coin. We know her almost entirely through one job: she was the sculptor who modeled the Arkansas Centennial half dollar, the silver fifty-cent piece the U.S. Mint struck from 1935 to 1939 to mark a hundred years of Arkansas statehood.

Here is the part worth knowing. A coin is rarely the work of one hand. A designer draws it; a modeler — a sculptor — turns that flat drawing into a precise plaster model in low relief, which the Mint shrinks down and cuts into the steel dies, the hardened stamps that press the design into blank metal. Bates was the modeler. The drawings came from an Arkansas-born artist named Edward Everett Burr, who had won the design competition. Getting them onto a coin fell to her.

She did it in famous company. The contemporary record places her work "in the studio of Lorado Taft" — one of the most celebrated American sculptors of the age, the man behind monumental public works like Fountain of Time — and names her simply Emily Bates of Chicago. Burr, as it happens, was a Chicago man too: an Arkansas native who had studied at the Art Institute, so the whole job ran through the city's sculptural circles. Beyond that studio and this commission, the record on Bates is thin. Her birth and death dates, her training, her nationality, anything else she may have made — none of it survives in the numismatic sources we can check. So this is a short page, and an honest one. We would rather tell you what we can verify than fill the gaps with invention.

The Arkansas coin had a hard birth, and Bates's work sat right in the middle of it.

Burr won the competition, but the Commission of Fine Arts — the federal body that signs off on the look of U.S. coins — wasn't satisfied. On July 27, 1934 it rejected his sketch as "unsuitable for a coin of the United States." The artist was kept on and asked to revise, with a specific instruction: turn the two frontal portraits into overlapping profiles. And when Bates was engaged to turn the revised drawings into finished models, the commission doubted her too — by the published account it regarded her, at first, as likewise unqualified for the work.

That is the real story of the job — not a smooth hand-off, but a sculptor working under direct, skeptical correction. A coin model has to read clearly at the size of a thumbnail, survive being struck again and again, and still look like art. Bates revised hers against that criticism until, by March 1935, the design at last won approval and could go forward to be reduced to the working tools the Mint stamps from.

The coin that resulted carries Burr's two motifs, and they sit in a famously odd place. On most U.S. coins the portrait is on the obverse — the heads side. Here it is flipped. The reverse carries the conjoined heads: an 1836 Native American chief in a headdress beside a young woman of the 1930s in a Phrygian cap, both facing left — a hundred years of the state met in a single image. The obverse — the side that would normally hold the portrait — instead shows an eagle with spread wings on a rising sun, set against a diamond ringed with stars, lifted from the Arkansas state flag. Whichever face you prefer, it reached metal because someone made it strikeable. That someone was Bates. It is the kind of contribution collectors overlook and shouldn't: not the idea, but the execution.

There is a quiet irony to her care. The sponsors who commissioned the coin went on to have it struck across five years and three mints in small batches — exactly the kind of manufactured scarcity that, by 1936, had turned the U.S. commemorative program into a speculative racket and drew the criticism that shut it down. Bates fought to get one design right. What was then done with it was out of her hands.