Robert Ball Hughes: the sculptor who reworked Liberty

Robert Ball Hughes was modeling real art before most boys could be trusted with a pocketknife. At twelve, the story goes, he shaped a small relief — a scene of the wisdom of Solomon — out of melted candle ends. It was good enough that someone had it cast in silver. The talent it pointed to was real: as a student he won the Royal Academy's large silver medal for the best relief copy of the Apollo Belvedere, the most famous antique statue in Europe.

He was born in London on 19 January 1804. (Many older books say 1806; his own baptismal record settles it at 1804.) He trained for seven years under Edward Hodges Baily, one of the most sought-after British sculptors of the day — the man who would carve the Nelson for the top of Nelson's Column.

Then, around 1829, Hughes did the unlikely thing. He left a thriving art world for a young country that had almost none. America in 1829 had no sculpture schools, no foundries to match Europe's, barely a market. He arrived in New York and set about building the thing he wanted to belong to.

The commissions came fast. A high-relief marble memorial to Bishop John Henry Hobart for Trinity Church. A statue of Governor DeWitt Clinton. And a statue of Alexander Hamilton — the first life-size marble figure carved in the United States — set inside New York's Merchants' Exchange. The Hamilton burned in the Great Fire of New York in 1835, just as the building did. For a sculptor, that is a particular kind of heartbreak: years of work, gone in a night. Hughes moved on — to Philadelphia, then to the Boston area, where he settled for good.

Hughes belonged to the first generation of sculptors trying to do in America everything Europe already did — and to do it here, with American hands and American metal. His signature achievement was as much engineering as art: a seated bronze figure of the mathematician and navigator Nathaniel Bowditch. He finished the model in 1843; it was cast and installed at Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1847. It is generally called the first large bronze statue cast in the United States — a quiet landmark in a country still learning to pour its own monuments.

That range — monument to miniature — is exactly what made him useful to the Mint. A coin design is sculpture in the hardest medium there is: a relief (a raised image) only fractions of a millimeter high, that has to read cleanly when struck into hard metal a million times over. The Mint did not need a portraitist. It needed someone who understood how cloth falls, how a body sits, how a figure holds together at the size of a thumbnail. Hughes had spent his life on precisely that.

He lived well in Dorchester, near Boston — well enough to host Charles Dickens on the novelist's American tour. But his final years turned the other way. He took up pyrography — drawing with a heated iron, scorching images into wood, so-called "poker pictures." He made striking ones: The Witches of Macbeth, the Blind Beggar of Gretna Green, a scene of General Grant proclaiming the fall of Richmond. He also made many of them for small money, a celebrated sculptor reduced to selling burnt-wood pictures. He died near Boston on 5 March 1868 and is buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Here is the thing collectors come to this page for. Hughes did not create the Seated Liberty coins. That design began with the painter Thomas Sully, who sketched a seated figure of Liberty on a rock, holding a shield and a liberty pole; the Mint's chief engraver, Christian Gobrecht, turned the sketch into working dies in the late 1830s. What Hughes did, in 1840, was retouch their work.

Mint Director Robert Maskell Patterson had a practical problem. Gobrecht's Liberty sat in high relief — it stood tall off the coin's surface — and high relief is the enemy of mass production. Metal does not flow easily into a deep die, so the coins came out weak and the dies wore fast. As the Mint geared up to strike silver in real volume, Patterson hired Hughes to bring the design down and firm it up. Hughes thickened Liberty's somewhat thin figure, lowered the relief, enlarged her head a touch, shrank the draped chair behind her, repositioned the shield, and reworked the banner and lettering. But the change everyone remembers is a single piece of cloth: he added drapery falling from Liberty's left elbow down across her knee.

That one fold did something nobody set out to do. It gave collectors a clean, visible line between coins struck before the change and coins struck after. The earlier figure is the "No Drapery" type; Hughes's reworked figure is the "Drapery" type. Because the switch happened in the middle of 1840, the year 1840 itself exists in both forms — exactly the kind of seam that makes a series fun to chase. On the New Orleans quarter the split is stark: roughly 382,000 of the 1840-O quarters came without drapery, but only about 43,000 with it. That made the 1840-O "Drapery" quarter the lowest-mintage Seated Liberty quarter struck for the next two decades.

A careful note, because the timeline trips people up. The reworking touched the whole silver family — half dime, dime, quarter, half dollar, and the new silver dollar of 1840. But the half dollar already had its own No-Drapery story: it debuted in 1839, and drapery was added to it that same year, before Hughes was ever on the scene. So the prized 1839 "No Drapery" half dollar is a Gobrecht-era coin, not a Hughes one. Hughes's hand is clearest on the smaller silver — the half dime, dime, and quarter — and on the dollar.

Was it an improvement? Here the verdict is anything but settled. Some find Hughes's Liberty fuller and more finished. Others think he stiffened a graceful original. The most quotable judgment is the harshest: the great coin scholar Walter Breen looked at the result and called it "a sorry mess." (More on that below.) And that argument is the whole point. A small, contested change by a sculptor most people have never heard of is why the Seated Liberty series carries one of the most-watched variety splits in all of American coinage.