James C. Sharpe

In the late 1950s, James C. Sharpe — "Jim" to everyone who hired him — was strapped into the cockpit of an F3H Demon, a single-seat Navy jet, flying off the carrier USS Bonhomme Richard in the western Pacific. He served one tour with fighter squadron VF-193 and then walked away from naval aviation for good.

What he walked toward was a drawing table. Sharpe enrolled at the Art Center School in Pasadena (today Art Center College of Design) and by the 1960s was building one of the most visible illustration careers in America. Through the 1970s and 1980s his paintings ran on the covers of Time, TV Guide, and Golf Digest — including a much-reproduced Time portrait of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin that toured in a traveling exhibition of the magazine's cover art. His style was a warm, almost photographic realism: a painted face that seemed to look back at you from the newsstand.

The work fanned out from there. He painted annual canvases for the U.S. Air Force for close to twenty years — pictures that now hang in the Pentagon and on bases around the country. He designed U.S. postage stamps. And for a brief stretch in the mid-1990s, he designed coins. That last chapter was small, but it was a natural fit: a man who had spent decades compressing a whole person into one magazine cover turned out to be very good at compressing an athlete into a coin.

Sharpe was not a Mint sculptor. He was an outside artist — an illustrator hired to design the picture, which a staff sculptor-engraver at the U.S. Mint then carved into the steel die (the hardened metal stamp that strikes the coin). The Mint leaned on this arrangement heavily for the sprawling 1995–1996 Atlanta program, bringing in well-known illustrators alongside its own engravers so that sixteen different coins could each have its own voice.

What Sharpe brought was the illustrator's instinct for the single telling pose. His Olympic obverses — the "heads" side, which carries the main design — don't pile on detail. A woman caught at the top of her tennis swing. A gymnast on the rings beside a gymnast with her arms thrown wide. Each is a body in motion, frozen at the instant that reads fastest to the eye. That economy is exactly the skill that sells a magazine cover from ten feet away — and it's harder than it looks at coin scale, where the whole composition has to survive being shrunk to 38 millimeters of metal.

His two Paralympic designs are the ones that stay with people. For the 1995 dollar he drew a blind runner tethered to a sighted guide, caught mid-stride — two athletes bound by a single cord of trust. For the 1996 dollar he drew an athlete in a wheelchair, arms up, racing in a track-and-field event under the words "Triumph of the Human Spirit." Both coins carry the word spirit rendered in raised Braille. A common claim calls these the first U.S. coins with Braille — but be precise: the Braille on these dollars is too small to actually read by touch, and it was the 2009 Louis Braille Bicentennial dollar that became the first U.S. coin with readable Braille. What Sharpe's coins were is the first to put Braille on American money at all — a deliberate, quietly radical gesture on a coin about athletes who compete without sight.

Coins were the footnote; stamps were a real body of work. Sharpe is credited as the artist behind the U.S. Postal Service's long-running Performing Arts commemorative series — roughly a dozen stamps issued across the late 1970s and into the 1980s, honoring figures of stage and screen. He painted the 1982 stamp of the Barrymore acting dynasty (Lionel, Ethel, and John together) and the 1984 tenor John McCormack stamp, which he designed jointly with the Irish artist Ron Mercer for that international issue.

It's worth pausing on the range. The same brush that captured a Cold War prime minister for Time, an F-15 over Langley for the Air Force, and the Barrymores for the Postal Service is the brush behind the blind runner on a silver dollar. Sharpe never specialized in any one subject — he specialized in the human face and the human figure, wherever an editor or an agency needed one.