Joseph A. Bailly

Joseph Alexis Bailly arrived in America running from a prison sentence. Born in Paris — most sources say January 21, 1823, though a few say 1825 — he was the son of a cabinetmaker and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in France. Then the Revolution of 1848 caught him. Drafted into the army, he struck an officer, deserted, and fled the country.

That flight became his life. He passed through England — where he studied briefly under the British sculptor Edward Hodges Baily — then drifted through the United States and Argentina before settling in Philadelphia around 1850. He arrived doing what his father had done: carving wood and furniture. By 1854 he had opened a sculpture studio. By 1860 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had elected him an Academician, its highest honor, and he would later teach there.

What makes Bailly worth knowing is what he chose to carve. A runaway from one revolution spent his career immortalizing the men of another. He sculpted the founders of the country that took him in — and got closer than almost any artist to putting Liberty in its citizens' hands.

Walk through Philadelphia and you keep meeting Bailly's founders. His marble George Washington, finished in 1869, stood outside Independence Hall — on the very steps where independence was declared — for four decades. (A bronze replica took its place in 1910; the original marble now stands in City Hall's Conversation Hall.) His Benjamin Franklin watched over the same neighborhood from the corner of the Public Ledger Building. For the nation's 1876 Centennial he sculpted John Witherspoon — the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence — caught mid-speech, arguing his fellow delegates toward independence. It still stands in West Fairmount Park.

He worked in Washington, too. In 1858 he designed the carved case of the Monumental Clock for the U.S. House of Representatives chamber; it now keeps time in the Capitol Crypt. In 1874 his standing statue of Civil War general John A. Rawlins — Ulysses Grant's chief of staff — became one of the earliest Civil War monuments raised in the capital.

That was his trade: clay built up large, then carved into marble or cast in bronze, a figure you walk around. A coin is the opposite art. A die is cut backward, into hardened steel, at the size of a fingernail, and struck millions of times. The Mint, hunting for fresh ideas in the 1870s, looked past its own engravers to outside artists — and there was Bailly, the city's monument-maker, working a few blocks away.

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Bailly took two swings at America's money, and both still survive — as patterns, the trial coins struck to test a design before it's approved.

The first came in 1873, for the brand-new Trade Dollar, a silver coin built to compete in the China trade. Bailly's obverse — the heads side — showed Liberty seated beside a globe marked LIBERTY, a liberty pole and cap in her hand, surrounded by a wheat sheaf, two bales of cotton, and a tobacco plant: the crops America shipped to the world. Catalogued today as Judd-1315, it's an arresting design. The Mint chose William Barber's competing version instead.

The next year he tried the new twenty-cent piece. He drew another seated Liberty; chief engraver William Barber supplied the reverse (in one version, the bold words 20 CENTS inside a laurel wreath). It was struck in copper, silver, and white metal, and catalogued as Judd-1355. Then Mint superintendent James Pollock killed it — for a sharp, practical reason. Bailly's Liberty looked too much like the Seated Liberty already on every other silver coin, especially the quarter. A twenty-cent coin you couldn't tell from a twenty-five-cent coin was a problem waiting to happen.

Pollock was right, and the irony is brutal. The Mint chose a different Seated Liberty design — and the twenty-cent piece still got hopelessly confused with the quarter. The public hated it. Congress abolished it in 1878, after barely three years. Bailly's rejected design and the one that beat it both lost; his just lost faster. Today his patterns are prized by collectors precisely because they were the road not taken — the founding sculptor's signature, on the one surface where it never reached the public's hands.