Titian Peale: the naturalist who gave America its flying eagle

Titian Ramsay Peale was born in Philadelphia in 1799, into the most artistic family in early America. His father was Charles Willson Peale — portraitist of the Revolution, founder of one of the country's first natural history museums. Charles named his sons after the old masters: Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian. The names were a bet on what each boy might become.

Titian did not become a portrait painter like his brothers. He became a naturalist who could draw — which in his century was its own profession. As a teenager his butterfly illustrations were already appearing in the entomologist Thomas Say's American Entomology. At nineteen he crossed half a continent: in 1819 and 1820 he traveled toward the Rocky Mountains with Major Stephen Long's expedition, sketching animals and country no Eastern artist had ever seen. He went on to collect for the great bird book of the age, Charles Lucien Bonaparte's continuation of Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology.

Then came the voyage that defined him. In 1838 Peale shipped out as chief naturalist on the United States Exploring Expedition — the Wilkes Expedition — a four-year U.S. Navy circumnavigation that reached the Pacific and the edge of Antarctica. He collected and identified roughly four hundred species of butterfly and moth new to science. In 1841 his ship, the Peacock, wrecked on the Oregon coast. Most of his specimens, his notes, and his library went down with it. It is hard to overstate the loss: a man widely called America's first lepidopterist, his life's catalogue scattered in the surf.

That is the man the Mint came to. When it needed an eagle, it did not ask a sculptor for a coat of arms. It asked someone who had spent his life watching real eagles fly.

The eagle, the dollar, and the Mint <!-- kind: prose; anchor: the-eagle -->

In the mid-1830s the U.S. Mint set out to revive the silver dollar, which had not been struck for circulation in over thirty years. Mint Director Robert M. Patterson had a vision for it, and he split the work between two artists. In a letter dated August 1, 1835, he asked the celebrated portrait painter Thomas Sully to design the front — the obverse, the "heads" side — as a seated figure of Liberty. And he asked Titian Peale to design the back: not a stiff heraldic bird, but, in Patterson's own words, "an Eagle flying, and rising in flight, amidst a constellation" of stars.

Here is the distinction collectors get wrong constantly. Peale designed the reverse eagle. Sully designed the Seated Liberty obverse. Neither man cut a coin. Turning a painter's sketch into hardened steel dies is a separate craft, and it was done by the Mint's second engraver, Christian Gobrecht — which is why the resulting coin is called the Gobrecht dollar and carries his name beneath Liberty. The 1836 dollar is a collaboration of three hands: Sully's Liberty, Peale's eagle, Gobrecht's steel.

Peale's eagle was unlike anything on American money before it. Past eagles stood flat and heraldic, clutching arrows and an olive branch, facing forward like a seal. Peale gave the Mint a living bird — wings beating, body climbing, rising through a field of stars. It was the instinct of a naturalist, not a herald: an eagle as it actually looks in the air, going up.

A famous story says he modeled it on Peter, a tame bald eagle that Mint workers fed in the early 1830s until the bird was caught in the coining machinery and killed. Peter was stuffed and is still displayed at the Philadelphia Mint, so that part is real. Whether Peter was truly Peale's model is not known with certainty — the sources that repeat it say so themselves. Enjoy it as tradition, not documented fact.

There is one more thread. The man running much of the Mint's machinery in these years — Melter and Refiner, later Chief Coiner — was Franklin Peale, Titian's own brother. When Titian's eagle went onto the dies, it was being struck in a building his brother helped run.

Most coin designs have one life. Peale's eagle had two — with a long gap in between.

Its first life was brief and now legendary. The flying eagle flew only on the Gobrecht dollars struck from 1836 to 1839, in tiny numbers — fewer than two thousand of the original 1836 issue — which is why those coins are blue-chip rarities today. When the Mint finally began striking the silver dollar for general circulation in 1840, it kept Sully's Seated Liberty on the front but dropped Peale's eagle from the back. In its place went an old-fashioned heraldic eagle based on a design by former Mint engraver John Reich. So the bird people most associate with Liberty's dollar never actually circulated on it. It belongs to the rare Gobrecht pieces alone.

Its second life came almost twenty years later, and reached far more pockets. When James B. Longacre designed the Flying Eagle cent of 1856–1858 — America's first small cent, struck by the tens of millions — he reached back to the Gobrecht-era flying eagle as his model. A bird first sketched by a butterfly collector in 1835 ended up on the most widely collected small cent of its decade.

After his Mint commission Peale went back to his real work. He served for years as an examiner at the U.S. Patent Office, took up amateur photography around 1855, and kept mounting his butterflies — nearly a hundred boxes of them survive at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. He died in 1885, remembered as a naturalist. That his most public legacy is a coin design is one of the quiet ironies of American numismatics.