John Eckstein

In 1795 the young Philadelphia Mint had an embarrassment on its hands. Its first silver dollars — the Flowing Hair design, struck the year before — were widely thought to be crude and ugly. The country wanted a coinage it could be proud of. The Mint wanted a new Liberty, and it wanted her fast.

The idea came from Gilbert Stuart, the most celebrated painter in the country — the man who would soon paint the George Washington that still stares out from the one-dollar bill. Stuart sketched Liberty as a graceful woman, hair loose, a gown draped across her shoulder. (Collectors have long repeated that he modeled her on Ann Willing Bingham, a famous Philadelphia society beauty. It is a lovely tradition — but the record only suggests it, and never proves it.)

A drawing, though, is not a coin. Someone had to lift Stuart's flat sketch into three dimensions — a sculpted model the Mint's engraver could copy into steel. That job went to John Eckstein.

On September 9, 1795, the Mint's records note a payment of $30 to Eckstein for "two models for dollars" — one of the Liberty head, one of the reverse eagle and wreath. From those plaster models, Chief Engraver Robert Scot cut the dies — the hardened steel stamps that strike a design into metal. Eckstein's hands shaped the face. Scot's engraved the steel. The coin we now call the Draped Bust dollar was born from that handoff.

It is one of the strangest pairings in American coinage. The man hired to model Liberty for a flat fee had, three decades earlier, been a sculptor at the court of one of the most powerful kings in Europe.

Eckstein was born in 1735 at Poppenreuth, near Nuremberg, the son of a woodcarver and cabinetmaker. He trained at Nuremberg's academy of arts, then went to London. There, in the workshop of the sculptors Benjamin and Thomas Carter, he signed the carved relief on a monument that still stands in Westminster Abbey — the memorial to Roger Townshend, erected in 1761. (In fairness, he was executing a design modeled by another artist, the Frenchman Luc-François Breton; even his most famous early work was collaborative.) Twice in the 1760s he won premiums from London's Society of Arts.

Then, in 1765, Frederick the Great of Prussia called him to court. Eckstein became a royal sculptor, working at Potsdam and the palace of Sanssouci. In 1786 he took the death mask of Frederick himself, and from it made wax busts of the dead king. This was an artist at the center of European patronage, carving for crowns.

By 1793 he had crossed the Atlantic — he wrote to Washington from Potsdam asking for help with the passage — and settled in Philadelphia, advertising an exhibition of his work on Market Street. The Mint's accounts record him as a resident of Providence, Rhode Island. He was a founding figure of an early Philadelphia art academy, published a short-lived drawing magazine, and years later exhibited a grand equestrian statue of Washington. He was, in short, a versatile artist scrambling for commissions in a brand-new country. The dollar model was one job among dozens.

His American reputation has come down to us as faint praise. The painter Thomas Sully called him "a thorough-going drudge in the arts. He could do you a picture in still life — history — landscape — portrait — he could model — cut a head in marble — anything you please." Read it twice: it is a backhanded compliment that is mostly compliment — Sully is describing a man who could do anything asked of him. The modern numismatic writer Walter Breen was harsher, dismissing him as "a local artistic hack." Yet the Liberty Eckstein modeled is one of the most admired faces in early American coinage. The gap between what he made and the credit he got is the quiet heart of his story.

One thing to keep straight: Eckstein's son was also named John, and was a painter who worked in England and the West Indies. Father and son are easy to confuse, and even careful sources do. The Mint's Eckstein is the father — the old court sculptor.

The credit here is genuinely tangled, so it's worth being precise. Stuart drew the design. Eckstein modeled it in plaster. Robert Scot engraved the dies and oversaw production — with sketches first approved by the Mint's leadership and sent on to President Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson before any metal was struck. No single person "designed" the Draped Bust coinage the way one designer owns a modern coin.

So when you see a slab labeled "Scot / Eckstein," that's the honest shorthand: the engraver and the modeler, working from a famous painter's idea. Eckstein's plaster was the bridge between Stuart's paper and Scot's steel.

And here is the part most people miss. That bridge did not carry one coin — it carried nearly the whole early federal coinage. The Draped Bust Liberty spread far beyond the dollar: onto the half dollar, quarter, dime, and half dime in silver, and onto the cent and half cent in copper, running from the mid-1790s into the early 1800s. For more than a decade, when an American reached into a pocket, the face looking back was the one Eckstein had shaped in plaster for thirty dollars.

The reverse changed while his portrait stayed. The earliest coins carry a small, natural-looking perched eagle. In early 1798 the Mint switched to the Heraldic Eagle — the wings-spread, shield-breasted bird lifted from the Great Seal of the United States. Through both, the obverse — the heads side — kept Eckstein's Liberty.