Hans Schuler

Hans Schuler came to Baltimore as an immigrant child and left the city covered in bronze.

He was born in 1874 in Morange, a village in Alsace-Lorraine — the borderland that kept changing hands between France and Germany, and that flew the German flag the year he was born. His family emigrated to the United States while he was still young. He grew up in Baltimore and trained at the Maryland Institute, the school we now call MICA, in its Rinehart School of Sculpture. Then he crossed back over the Atlantic to study in Paris at the Académie Julian, under the French sculptor Raoul Verlet.

In 1901, at twenty-seven, he won the gold medal at the Paris Salon — the most prestigious art exhibition in the world. He was the first American sculptor ever to take it. The winning work was Ariadne, a life-sized marble of the abandoned princess of Greek myth, twisting in grief. Henry Walters bought it; it hangs today in the Walters Art Museum in his adopted city.

He could have stayed in Paris. Instead he went home. For the next fifty years he was, by common consent, the monument maker of the "Monumental City" — the nickname Baltimore had carried since John Quincy Adams toasted it in 1823. From 1925 until his death he also ran the Maryland Institute as its president, shaping artists for more than a quarter century. He died in Baltimore in 1951, at seventy-seven.

Schuler worked in the grand public tradition — the heroic figure, the memorial, the portrait in metal meant to outlast everyone who remembered the man. Walk through Baltimore and you walk through his career. Johns Hopkins seated in bronze near the university, the poet Sidney Lanier close by, a Martin Luther monument standing over the city. In Washington he carved the marble memorial to President James Buchanan in Meridian Hill Park.

The career was not all triumph. One Johns Hopkins commission was rejected outright, and the loss bit into him financially — a reminder that even the city's favorite sculptor lived and died by the next contract. His studio on East Lafayette Avenue, built in 1906 with a twenty-four-foot ceiling and doors wide enough to roll a monument through, still stands. His son turned it into the Schuler School of Fine Arts in 1959, and it teaches Old Master technique there to this day.

So when Maryland wanted a coin for its 300th birthday, the choice was obvious: the state's most famous sculptor, a professor at its own art school, would design the 1934 Maryland Tercentenary half dollar — both sides of it.

A coin is a brutal test for a monument maker. A statue can be twenty feet tall; a coin is the width of a thumbnail, and its design rises barely a millimeter off the surface — that height is the relief. Schuler had to squeeze a portrait, a coat of arms, two allegorical figures, and a state motto into that tiny field. For the face on the front — the obverse, the heads side — he chose Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Baron Baltimore, the Catholic nobleman King Charles I granted the Maryland colony. He did not invent a likeness. He borrowed one, from a well-known 17th-century portrait of Lord Baltimore by the painter Gerard Soest. His initials, a small HS, sit beside the M in MARYLAND on the back.

That borrowed portrait is where the story turns sharp.

Every U.S. coin design passes the Commission of Fine Arts, the federal body that reviews public art. On the commission sat Lee Lawrie, himself one of the great architectural sculptors of the age. Lawrie looked at Lord Baltimore's broad, flat collar and objected: that was a Puritan's collar, he said — not the lace and finery a Cavalier and a Catholic like Baltimore would have worn.

Schuler gave ground on the lettering. On the collar, he would not budge. He had copied it straight from the Soest painting, he argued; it was history, not invention. He won. The coin went out exactly as he modeled it, collar and all — and collectors have retold the argument ever since.

There is a deeper irony Schuler may not have dwelt on. The dignified face on the coin belongs to a man who never once saw Maryland. Cecil Calvert governed his colony from a country house in Yorkshire and sent his brother Leonard to lead the settlers who landed in 1634. The tercentenary celebrated a founding its founder watched from an ocean away — and Schuler put that absent man's borrowed face on 25,000 pieces of silver.

To get the coins out in time, the dies weren't cut the usual way at the Mint. The Medallic Art Company of New York prepared them, and the Philadelphia Mint struck the run.