Robert Lamb

Most coin designers come to the Mint as sculptors of faces and figures. Robert Bennett Lamb came as a man who cut letters into granite for a living — and who talked the U.S. government into letting him do the same thing on gold.

Lamb was born in Cranston, Rhode Island, on May 25, 1922. He went to sea before he went to art school: a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, he served through the Second World War and rose to Chief Engineer. Only afterward did he turn to art — a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1952, then a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 1954.

For the rest of his life he worked from a studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island, as a sculptor and a letterer. He carved tombstones for forty years. He cut the seals at the gates of the University of Rhode Island and the Roger Williams University law school. He taught drawing, calligraphy, and letter carving at RISD. He died on February 26, 2012, at 89.

He is not a household name. His reputation in numismatics — the study and collecting of coins and money — rests on a single, surprising year. In 1991 his hand-drawn lettering appeared on two United States commemorative coins, and one of them broke a rule that had held for the entire history of the U.S. Mint.

In 1990 Congress authorized a set of coins to mark the 50th anniversary of Mount Rushmore, the four-president carving Gutzon Borglum finished in 1941. Three coins were planned — a half dollar, a silver dollar, and a $5 gold piece — and the Mint held a design competition. Lamb won the reverse — the "tails" side — of the gold coin.

His winning design had no image at all. At the center sat the inscription "MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL," set in four lines of flowing calligraphy, with the required legends — UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, E PLURIBUS UNUM, FIVE DOLLARS — running around the rim. No portrait. No figure. No scene. Just words, drawn beautifully. For the first time in the history of U.S. commemorative coinage, one side of a coin carried no emblem or motif whatsoever.

Lamb said the idea came straight from his trade. He approached the Mount Rushmore coin as a calligrapher, hoping it might bring "a style and interest somewhat different from other types." It did. A coin is normally a tiny sculpture; Lamb treated it as a page — the same instinct that had guided his chisel across four decades of headstones and dedication plaques.

A designer rarely cuts the coin himself, and Lamb, busy with other commissions, did not. His drawing was modeled — turned into the shallow three-dimensional relief a die can strike — by U.S. Mint sculptor-engraver William C. Cousins. On the finished coin both men's initials appear: RL for Lamb's design, WC for Cousins's modeling. (The obverse — the "heads" side, with an eagle clutching the sculptor's tools that carved the mountain — was the work of the Mint's John Mercanti.)

The same year, Lamb designed the obverse of the 1991 USO 50th Anniversary silver dollar, honoring the United Service Organizations, founded in 1941 to support American troops. That side, too, leans on lettering: a USO pennant and the words "50th Anniversary," an emblem and a few words standing in for the picture a coin usually carries. Mercanti designed its reverse — an eagle perched on a globe.

The two 1991 coins are the slivers of Lamb's career most likely to end up in a collector's slab, but they were never the center of his work. He was, first and last, a sculptor of the human figure who happened to be a master of letters.

His public commissions sit in places far from the coin album. He cut a granite relief seven feet across for the United States Trust Company in New York. He made two bronze reliefs for the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C. He made three more for the Boston Marathon monument in Copley Square. In 1977 he won a competition to honor the working people of Woonsocket, Rhode Island; two decades later that monument was chosen as the emblem of the city's new Museum of Work and Culture and moved to its front courtyard. His work entered private collections including the Hirshhorn in Washington.

That range is the point. The Mount Rushmore reverse wasn't a graphic designer's clever trick — it was what happened when a man who had spent his life making letters carry weight in stone was finally handed a coin.