James Peed

James Melvin Peed was born on April 25, 1945, in the small tobacco-and-river town of Washington, North Carolina. Art came later. First came the Army — Peed served from 1963 to 1966, the years the United States slid into Vietnam.

Only after the uniform came off did he chase the training. He studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1969, took classes at Northern Virginia Community College in 1971–72, and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts — one of the oldest art schools in the country — in 1973. He came to coins as a painter, not as a die-sinker.

He joined the Mint's staff in 1972 and worked as a graphic artist in its Washington, D.C., office from 1975, eventually rising to manage the Mint's graphics group. That title matters. Peed was not a sculptor-engraver — the in-house artists who model a coin's relief and cut its dies. He was a designer: the person who shapes the drawing a coin begins as. On his most famous pieces, his idea on paper became someone else's three-dimensional model in steel. That division of labor is the whole shape of his career.

The clearest example is the 1984 Olympic ten-dollar gold eagle. It was a landmark twice over: the first gold coin the United States had struck since 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt pulled gold out of American pockets — and the first U.S. coin ever to carry the "W" mint mark of the West Point Mint. Its obverse — the heads side — shows a male and a female runner lifting an Olympic torch together. That image grew from a sketch by James Peed, which the Mint's John Mercanti then reworked and modeled into the finished coin. The drawing was Peed's; the relief in steel was Mercanti's. A sketch became a $10 gold piece.

You see the same handoff on his best-known design, the 1997 Franklin Delano Roosevelt five-dollar gold half eagle. Peed designed its reverse — the tails side — choosing to render the Presidential Seal exactly as it appeared at FDR's 1933 inauguration. The sculptor Thomas D. Rogers translated that drawing into a model. (The Roosevelt portrait on the obverse was the work of another Mint artist, T. James Ferrell.) There is a quiet symmetry collectors enjoy here: the man Peed honored was the same president whose 1933 order had ended American gold coinage in the first place.

His hand runs through the modern commemorative era this way, almost always on the reverse. He designed the eagle on the back of the 1992 Olympic five-dollar gold half eagle. He did the reverse modeling for the 1997 Jackie Robinson five-dollar gold coin. And on the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy silver dollar he designed the reverse — the eagle and shield of the Justice Department seal overlapping the seal of the U.S. Senate, the two offices Kennedy held — modeled by Thomas D. Rogers Sr. Beyond coins, the Mint's artist record credits Peed with winning the competition to design the 1986 Vietnam Veterans National Medal. The man who drew Olympic runners had himself worn the uniform two decades before.