Thomas D. Rogers Sr.

In the year 2000, the United States dropped a new gold-colored dollar into millions of pockets. On its back, an eagle climbs the sky inside a ring of seventeen stars. The man who carved that eagle had spent four years in the Navy, two decades sculpting medals for hire, and most of his career refusing to abandon a way of working that nearly everyone else already had.

Thomas D. Rogers Sr. was born in 1945 in New York's Hudson Valley — the Smithsonian American Art Museum gives his birthplace as Poughkeepsie, and he was raised in the nearby village of Wingdale. After four years in the United States Navy he earned an associate's degree in commercial art, then went looking for work as a sculptor. He found it in the 1970s at the Medallic Art Company — the firm behind countless American medals — where he learned to model in relief: the shallow, controlled sculpture that has to read clearly when it is shrunk to the size of a coin.

For close to twenty years he was a freelance medallic sculptor, moving from one private mint to the next — among them Presidential Art Medals, The Metal Arts Co., Tri-State Mint, Johnson-Matthey, and Medalcraft Mint. He carved more than ninety portrait sculptures of inductees that hang in the Honors Court at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts — the kind of bread-and-butter commission that teaches an artist to capture a likeness fast and make it last in metal. In October 1991, at age forty-six, he joined the United States Mint as a sculptor-engraver at its Philadelphia facility. He stayed ten years.

Here is the detail that made Rogers' name among people who know coins. Most medallic sculptors build their design up: they model the raised image in modeling clay — the plasteline stage — then cast it, then reduce it down to coin size. Rogers skipped the clay. He carved his designs directly into the negative plaster — cutting the image in reverse, sunken where the finished coin would rise.

It sounds like a parlor trick. It is really a feat of spatial imagination: you are sculpting a thing inside-out and back-to-front, holding the final positive image in your head while your hands cut its mirror. The American Numismatic Association credited exactly this — his "style of carving directly in the negative mold" — as the source of the fine, intricate detail in his work, and the reason for his standing in the field. The method also let him work fast and skip the modeling clay other sculptors leaned on.

By the time he retired it was nearly a lost art. The Mint's design process was going digital, with images modeled on screens and milled by machine. Rogers worked the other way to the end — carving the design, cutting into negative plaster, preparing the final dies by hand. He saw himself less as a stop on the way to software than as one more link in a chain of carvers reaching back centuries, and he liked it that way.

Two designs put Rogers in the pocket of nearly every American — and both are eagles in flight.

The first came in 1997, when the Mint launched the American Platinum Eagle, the country's first platinum bullion coin and, at 99.95% pure, its highest-purity coin. John Mercanti gave the front the Statue of Liberty; Rogers gave the back an eagle soaring over the American landscape, the sun behind it. His reverse became the anchor of the whole series: it has appeared on every bullion strike of the coin from 1997 onward, while the proof versions — the specially polished collector strikes — rotated through fresh designs almost every year. When the Mint marked the coin's 20th anniversary in 2017, it brought Rogers' original eagle back for the proof.

The second is the one children spend without a thought. When the Sacagawea "golden dollar" arrived in 2000 to replace the disliked Susan B. Anthony dollar, Glenna Goodacre sculpted the obverse — the "heads" side — showing Sacagawea carrying her infant son. Rogers carved the reverse: a soaring eagle ringed by seventeen stars, one for each state in the Union at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition that Sacagawea helped guide. The design did not survive untouched. Rogers' original proposal set mountains beneath the bird; that scenery was removed and other elements shifted before Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin signed off — an ordinary fact of life at the Mint, where a designer's vision passes through committees and a Secretary's pen before it ever strikes metal.

Beyond the famous two <!-- kind: prose; anchor: more-coins -->

Rogers' name is on a long shelf of coins most people never connect to one artist. He designed the reverses of three state quarters in the 50 State Quarters program — Maryland, Massachusetts (the Revolutionary War Minuteman), and South Carolina.

Through the 1990s he was one of the Mint's busiest hands for commemoratives, the special-issue coins struck to mark an event. His credits run from the 1992 Christopher Columbus Quincentenary dollar and half eagle, through the 1993 World War II 50th Anniversary dollar (both sides his), the 1994 Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Women in Military Service dollars, the 1995 Special Olympics dollar, the 1996 Olympic Games coins, and the obverses of the 1996 Smithsonian Institution 150th Anniversary and 1998 Robert F. Kennedy dollars. He also worked on the 2000 Library of Congress $10 — the first bimetallic coin in U.S. history, a gold ring around a platinum center.

The work did not stop when he retired in 2001. Under contract to the Mint, Rogers designed the reverse of the 2016 Native American dollar honoring the code talkers of the World Wars — two military helmets, the WWI Brodie and the WWII M1, with two feathers crossing to form a V for victory. In 2000 the American Numismatic Association gave him its Numismatic Art Award for Excellence in Medallic Sculpture, the field's nod to exactly the hand-carving tradition he had spent a career keeping alive.