Gilroy Roberts

Gilroy Roberts was born in Philadelphia on March 11, 1905, into a house where making art was simply the family trade. His father, John Taylor Roberts, and his mother, Blanch Dawson Gilroy, were both professional artists. The boy modeled clay and carved wood almost before he could write, and he never really stopped.

He trained the slow, old-fashioned way. After a childhood split between New York City and Bedford Village, New York, he took classes at the Frankford Evening Art School in Philadelphia and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., studying under sculptors including Heinz Warneke. That grounding in sculpture, not just drawing, is the key to everything he later did. A coin is a tiny bas-relief — a raised image standing off a flat field — and Roberts learned early to think in that shallow third dimension.

In 1936 he joined the United States Mint as an assistant sculptor-engraver, the understudy to chief engraver John R. Sinnock. He spent a dozen years learning the craft at Sinnock's elbow. Then, on July 22, 1948, President Truman appointed him the ninth chief engraver of the United States Mint — the artist responsible for the face of the nation's money.

He held that post for sixteen years. The job that made his name took six weeks.

President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Within hours, Mint Director Eva Adams telephoned Roberts about putting Kennedy on a silver coin. She called again on November 27 to give the project the go-ahead. Jacqueline Kennedy chose the half dollar — she did not want to push George Washington off the quarter.

Roberts had a head start, the kind that only comes from earlier work. He and fellow engraver Frank Gasparro had already cut the official Kennedy presidential medal, a portrait the president himself had approved while he was alive. Roberts adapted that left-facing profile for the coin's obverse — the heads side. Gasparro reworked the medal's eagle-and-shield for the reverse.

When the trial pieces were ready, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy reviewed them. Mrs. Kennedy liked the portrait but asked that the hair be softened slightly; she also turned down full- and half-figure designs because there was simply no time. Roberts made the change. Congress authorized the coin on December 30, 1963; the first dies were finished by January 2, 1964; and on January 30 the Denver Mint struck the first Kennedy half dollars. A grieving country emptied banks of them. Many people never spent theirs — they kept it.

Then came the strange part. Complaints reached the Denver Mint that the small mark at the base of Kennedy's neck — where the bust is cut off — hid a hammer and sickle, the emblem of Soviet communism. It did not. It was Roberts's signature: a stylized monogram of his initials, "GR." His own mentor Sinnock had drawn the very same suspicion a generation earlier, when cranks insisted the "JRS" on the Franklin half dollar stood for Joseph Stalin. Two engravers, two sets of initials, the same Cold War reflex reading treason into a sculptor's name.

The Kennedy half was not the first half dollar Roberts touched. His mentor, John Sinnock, designed the Franklin half dollar — Benjamin Franklin on the front, the Liberty Bell on the back — but died in May 1947 before the reverse was finished. The job of completing it fell to Roberts, the new chief engraver.

One detail there is his, and it shows how the Mint actually works. The little eagle perched beside the Liberty Bell looks like an afterthought because it was one. Officials realized that the Coinage Act of 1873 still required an eagle on every silver coin larger than a dime, so a small one had to be squeezed in. In December 1947 the Commission of Fine Arts — the federal panel that advises on the look of public art — objected that the eagle was "so small as to be insignificant" and warned that the crack in the bell would invite jokes. The Treasury overruled them. The Franklin half dollar was struck from 1948 to 1963, and the very next coin in that slot would be Roberts's own Kennedy.

Roberts was, above all, a portraitist in metal. His Kennedy obverse is clean and dignified — a calm profile that reads instantly at the size of a coin, which is far harder than it sounds. Well before the Kennedy half, while at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, he had even designed stamps for the 1940 Famous Americans series. As chief engraver he cut the official medals for Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, and he designed circulating coinage for nine foreign nations that asked the U.S. Mint for help — the British Virgin Islands, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, El Salvador, Haiti, Liberia, Syria, and Uruguay. The British Virgin Islands set, with its native birds, is among his most admired foreign work.

Then he did something no chief engraver before him had ever done: he left. Every one of his predecessors had held the office until they died. In 1964 the Philadelphia entrepreneur Joseph Segel was building a private mint and wanted, in his own sales pitch to clients, "the finest you can produce" — which to him meant the sitting U.S. chief engraver. Segel offered Roberts the title of chairman, the role of chief engraver, and a large block of company stock. Roberts resigned the federal post and took it. The company, General Numismatics Corporation, soon became famous as the Franklin Mint, the private mint that flooded the postwar market with commemorative medals and silver rounds — and the stock reportedly made him a millionaire many times over. He kept sculpting there, including a large piece called The Great American Eagle, until his death in Havertown, Pennsylvania, on January 26, 1992, at 86.