James M. Peed

James Melvin Peed was born in Washington, North Carolina, on April 25, 1945. He came to coins the long way around. First the U.S. Army, 1963 to 1966. Then art school — the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1969, Northern Virginia Community College in 1971–72, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1973.

He joined the U.S. Mint staff in 1972 and, from 1975, worked as a graphic artist out of the Mint's Washington, D.C. office, eventually managing its graphics group. In the early 1990s the press described him plainly as a Mint "visual information specialist" living in Falls Church, Virginia — a title that tells you exactly what he did. Peed was a designer, not a marble-and-clay sculptor. He drew the picture. Someone else then carved that drawing into the steel die that strikes the coin.

That division of labor is the key to reading his career. On a U.S. coin the credits split: one artist designs the image, another sculpts it into relief. Peed is the name on the design line, again and again — and almost always on the reverse. He is a member of the American Medallic Sculpture Association. Unlike the engravers whose tiny initials collectors hunt for under a glass, Peed worked in the background of programs the public knew by their famous subjects, never their artists.

A coin has two faces. The obverse — the "heads" side — almost always carries the portrait, the headline, the reason the coin exists. The reverse gets everything else: the symbol, the seal, the eagle, the inscription that has to tie the whole story together in one glance. It is the harder side to make memorable, and it was Peed's specialty.

Look at what he was handed. For the 1992 Olympic $5 gold half eagle — struck for the Barcelona and Albertville Games — the front went to a sprinter charging at the viewer. Peed got the back. He gave it an American eagle, shield across its breast, set against the Great Seal of the United States with the Olympic rings and "USA" riding above. A national emblem and an Olympic one, fused into a single device. He designed it and did the computer modeling himself — unusual for a man whose job usually ended at the drawing.

His best-loved reverse needs no eagle at all. For the 1997 Jackie Robinson $5 gold coin, William Cousins drew the obverse — an older Robinson, the civil-rights leader. Peed designed the reverse: a single baseball, marked "1919–1972" for Robinson's birth and death, around three words — "Legacy of Courage." One side is the man. The other is the whole life, said in one stitched ball. (Numista records John Mercanti as the sculptor who turned Peed's drawing into relief — design and sculpt, two hands, one coin.)

That same year he drew the reverse of the 1997 Franklin D. Roosevelt $5 gold coin, sculpted by Thomas D. Rogers Sr. Peed didn't invent a symbol for it — he recovered one. The reverse carries a finely rendered presidential seal as it appeared at FDR's first inauguration in 1933, a small act of historical exactness on a coin most people would never inspect that closely.

His quietest, most demanding job came in 1998: the Robert F. Kennedy silver dollar. Kennedy had served as both U.S. Attorney General and a U.S. Senator, and the reverse — which Peed designed with sculptor-engraver Thomas D. Rogers Sr. — had to say both. It layers the eagle and shield of the Department of Justice seal beneath the seal of the United States Senate. No portrait to lean on. Just heraldry, asked to carry a biography.

There's a near-miss worth knowing, too. For the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic $10 gold eagle, Peed designed the obverse — but the work was reshaped, and both sides were modeled, by John Mercanti before the coin was struck. It's a clean illustration of how Mint design actually works. A sketch passes through many hands on its way to metal, and the credit is almost always shared.