Jamie Wyeth

Jamie Wyeth was born into the most famous family in American painting. His grandfather was N.C. Wyeth, the illustrator whose pirates and knights filled a generation of storybooks. His father was Andrew Wyeth, who painted Christina's World and became one of the most beloved American artists of the twentieth century. Jamie — born James Browning Wyeth in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 6, 1946 — was the third Wyeth to make a living with a brush.

He almost skipped a normal schooling to do it. After six years of public school he was tutored at home, and at twelve he began studying with his aunt, the painter Carolyn Wyeth, in N.C. Wyeth's old studio. The lessons were old-fashioned and relentless: draw, then draw more. At nineteen, wanting to understand the human body, he went to a New York City morgue to sketch anatomy. That mix — a sheltered rural childhood and an unflinching eye — became his signature.

By his early twenties he was a sought-after portraitist. In 1967, barely twenty-one, he painted a haunting posthumous portrait of John F. Kennedy on commission from the Kennedy family. He went on to paint Andy Warhol and the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, and his own father. He works in oil, watercolor, and the demanding egg-tempera technique his family was known for — paint bound with egg yolk, built up in thin, glowing layers — plus etching and lithography. He is a realist, but a stranger, brighter one than his father: drawn to islands, animals, and odd, unsettling light.

In 1995 the U.S. Mint struck a silver dollar to honor the Special Olympics World Games. The obverse — the heads side — needed a portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the woman who had founded the Special Olympics. The Mint did something unusual: it turned to a famous painter, not a staff engraver. It turned to Jamie Wyeth.

The choice made sense. Wyeth was a master portraitist with ties to the family — his JFK portrait had been a Kennedy commission, and his wife, Phyllis Mills Wyeth, had worked for John F. Kennedy and on the arts-for-the-disabled cause Shriver's circle championed. So Wyeth did what he always did: he sat with his subject. He met Shriver for several posing sessions at the Special Olympics offices in Washington, drew her from life, and handed the drawing to the Mint for its sculptors to translate into coinage relief — the raised, three-dimensional surface that a die strikes into metal.

Then came the part Wyeth never forgot. A week later he was called in to approve the sculptors' model and, in his own words, looked on "to my horror." The Mint had smoothed Shriver out. "Gone was Eunice's age-acquired character," he recalled — "lines and wrinkles were miraculously erased." He phoned Shriver in distress. She laughed and told him to "put those lines and wrinkles back in — they were hard won!" Wyeth still thought the finished coin looked "a bit like Betty Crocker," but he credited Shriver's reply as the reality check the portrait needed. The veteran Mint sculptor-engraver Thomas James Ferrell modeled the obverse into the dies; the reverse — a rose, a Special Olympics medal, and Shriver's own words, "As we hope for the best in them, hope is reborn in us" — was the work of another Mint sculptor, Thomas D. Rogers.

Wyeth drew one face — but it carried a first. The 1995 Special Olympics dollar is widely cited as the first U.S. coin to depict a living woman. Shriver was very much alive when it was struck; for most of American history, custom kept living people off the coinage entirely. A painter's portrait of a living founder, struck in silver while she could hold the coin in her hand, broke a long, quiet tradition.

The coin's life after the Mint was harder than its design. Congress had authorized up to 800,000 of them, with a $10 surcharge on every sale routed to the games' organizing committee. Sales fell far short: the proof version (struck at Philadelphia) reached 351,764 and the uncirculated version (struck at West Point) just 89,301. Collectors tell a story — well attested in the numismatic press — that a single company bought a quarter-million proofs to keep the program from outright failure, later giving the coins away to Special Olympics athletes. The face Wyeth fought to keep wrinkled outlasted the sales math: it is the part of the coin people remember.