T. James Ferrell

T. James Ferrell did not set out to make money — at least not the kind you spend. He set out to be a painter, and for most of his life that is exactly what he was.

He was born Thomas James Ferrell in Clayton, New Jersey, on September 28, 1939. The talent showed early: still a high-school student, he won a Hallmark honors prize for his artwork. The serious training came next. He graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1963, studying painting, sculpture and printmaking, then spent two more years at the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia — a school built around one of the great private collections of modern art. Along the way he collected the academy's honors: a Cresson traveling scholarship to study in Europe, the Charles Toppan Prize for oil painting, and prizes in printmaking.

For six years after art school he worked as a staff artist at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin — a daily newspaper, not a foundry. The pivot to metal came in 1969, when he joined The Franklin Mint — a private company that strikes collector medals and coins, not the federal mint. He learned the craft there under Gilroy Roberts, who had been chief engraver of the United States Mint and whose portrait of John F. Kennedy was already on half a billion coins. By the time Ferrell finally walked into the U.S. Mint himself, in August 1989, he was no apprentice. He was a fully formed sculptor in his fifties, with twenty years of dies behind him.

A coin looks flat, but it is sculpture. The engraver's real medium is relief — how high or low each shape rises from the surface — and getting it right is the whole game. Too high and the metal won't fill the design when it's struck; too flat and the portrait dies. Ferrell would sketch a design, then sculpt it many times oversize in plaster. That model is shrunk and cut into a hardened steel die, the stamp that presses the image into a blank coin. A portrait carved badly haunts every example ever made; a good one outlives its maker by centuries.

His twenty years at the Franklin Mint had taught him the production side cold — not just how to model a face, but how to make it strike up cleanly a hundred thousand times. That mattered, because he arrived at the U.S. Mint at the busiest moment in modern American coinage.

The 1990s were the great age of the modern commemorative — a coin Congress authorizes to mark an anniversary or fund a cause, sold to collectors at a premium that flows to the cause itself. Lawmakers approved them by the dozen, and the Mint's tiny engraving staff had to feed the demand. Ferrell became one of its most prolific hands, sculpting more than thirty commemoratives between 1991 and 2004.

Start with the one most people have seen. For the 1992 Christopher Columbus Quincentenary half dollar, Ferrell designed both sides — the obverse (the heads side) showing Columbus at landfall with arms outstretched and his crew behind him, and the reverse with his three ships, the Niña, Pinta and Santa María.

The next year brought his most quietly clever piece. The 1993 Thomas Jefferson 250th Anniversary silver dollar carries Jefferson on the obverse and his home, Monticello, on the reverse — again, both Ferrell's work. But the portrait wasn't invented from scratch: Ferrell rendered it from Gilbert Stuart's famous painting of Jefferson, translating a flat canvas into low relief. Collectors loved it. The entire authorized mintage sold out.

Then the small, human detail that makes a design. For the 1997 Franklin D. Roosevelt gold five-dollar coin — a half eagle — Ferrell modeled the obverse from one of FDR's own favorite photographs, taken in 1938, showing the president on the bridge of the cruiser USS Houston in a boat cloak. (The reverse, the presidential seal, was the work of fellow engraver James M. Peed — coins are often a collaboration.)

His career bookended a decade of American milestones. He cut the obverse of the 2002 West Point Bicentennial dollar — five cadets of the color guard marching toward you, the Cadet Chapel behind them — and the obverse of the 2003 First Flight Centennial dollar, the conjoined heads of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Earlier, he had modeled the reverses of the 1991 Mount Rushmore half dollar and the 1991 Korean War Memorial silver dollar, and worked on the 1992 Olympic, 1993–1994 World War II, and World Cup commemoratives.

When the 50 State Quarters program launched in 1999, it turned ordinary circulating coins into a national collecting craze — children filling cardboard maps, adults checking their change. Ferrell sculpted five of the reverses: Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Vermont.

Here the engraver's role is worth understanding, because it isn't what most people assume. The ideas for state quarters came from the states and their citizens; the Mint's artists turned those concepts into struck coins. Connecticut's spreading Charter Oak, for instance, grew from a design submitted by a Connecticut resident — Ferrell adapted and sculpted it into the relief that actually went into the dies. It is invisible craftsmanship: the kind of work that makes someone else's idea look effortless in metal. For a few years, his hand was quietly in a great many American pockets.

Some of Ferrell's most demanding work never circulated at all. Through the Mint's medal program he sculpted Congressional Gold Medals — the highest civilian honor Congress can award, struck one at a time for a single recipient. His subjects read like a roll call of the twentieth century: the Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and the evangelist Billy Graham with his wife Ruth. A circulating coin must survive a million strikes; a presentation medal must bear the weight of one famous face studied up close. Ferrell did both.

In 2002 the American Numismatic Association gave Ferrell its Numismatic Art Award for Excellence in Medallic Sculpture — the field's chief recognition for the people who actually shape coins and medals, rather than the ones who catalog and trade them. The award itself was a small engraved gold medal: a coin artist, honored with a coin. He retired from the Mint the following year and died in 2020, at eighty.

He is one of those names that almost no one outside the hobby knows, yet whose work nearly every American has held. That is the quiet fate of the coin engraver. The art rides in millions of pockets; the artist signs it with two letters and disappears. Look closely at a Columbus half dollar or a Jefferson dollar, though, and the hand is unmistakable — a painter's eye, working in steel.