John Howard Benson

John Howard Benson did something almost no other coin designer ever did: he made his living with a chisel and a slab of slate.

He was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on July 6, 1901, and he stayed. He went to the local Rogers High School, then trained in New York at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League — the path of a painter or printmaker. But the thing that caught him was older and closer to home: the deep, hand-drawn letters on the colonial gravestones in Newport's burying grounds. He turned toward stone.

In 1927 he bought the John Stevens Shop on Thames Street — a letter-carving business founded in 1705, and one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in America. Benson did more than keep the doors open. At a moment when the rest of the trade had switched to sandblasting and machine-cut letters, he carved by hand, by eye, and built the shop into the heart of a craft revival. It is still carving today, run by his descendants.

Benson's real subject was the single letter. He was a calligrapher as much as a carver, and he believed the drawn letter and the cut letter were one problem solved in two materials — pen on paper, chisel in stone. He taught both.

From 1931 until his death he was professor of sculpture, calligraphy, and design theory at the Rhode Island School of Design, just up the bay in Providence. His teaching reached far past his own students through two books. The Elements of Lettering (1940), written with Arthur Graham Carey, became a standard. Then, in 1954, came the work he is most remembered for: The First Writing Book — his English translation and facsimile of Ludovico degli Arrighi's Operina, the 1522 manual that first taught the elegant italic "chancery" hand. Benson hand-lettered the entire translation himself. It is calligraphy about calligraphy.

His chisel left marks beyond Newport, too. He carved for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the Groton School, and he cut the seal and diploma that the Rhode Island School of Design still uses. In 1955 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The coin grew out of this same hand. When the Rhode Island Tercentenary needed designers in 1935, the job went to Benson and Carey for a plain reason: the two had already cut dies for small medals. A coin die is just lettering and low relief carved into metal — Benson's day job, shrunk to the size of a thumbnail.

What the coin shows <!-- kind: prose; anchor: the-coin -->

The 1936 Rhode Island Tercentenary half dollar marked 300 years since Roger Williams founded Providence — though, oddly, the word "Providence" appears nowhere on it.

On the obverse — the heads side — Roger Williams kneels in a canoe with one hand raised in friendship, greeting a Narragansett man on the shore. A cornstalk stands behind the Narragansett, and a sun rises behind them both. It is a small picture carrying a big idea: the religious liberty that made Rhode Island. The reverse holds the state's own emblem — the anchor, under the single word HOPE.

Benson and Carey drew the designs; the plaster models were reduced to coin-sized hubs by the Medallic Art Company of New York, and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved the work on December 20, 1935. What followed was less dignified. The coins went on sale through Rhode Island banks on March 5, 1936, at a dollar each — and "sold out" within hours. In truth, insiders had held back the supply and were soon reselling sets at seven to nine times face. The episode was one of several that pushed Congress to rein in commemorative coins by the end of the decade. None of that was the designers' doing; it was a hard lesson in how a beautiful object can be turned into a racket.