Tom Nielsen

Tom Nielsen was born in 1948 in Clinton, Iowa, a town on the Mississippi. He started in pastels as a boy, taught partly by his grandmother, and was painting in oils by ten. Then, out of high school, he joined the Navy — and the water he would paint for the rest of his life stopped being a hobby and became a place he had actually been.

His own studio biography puts it plainly: he spent "several years of life aboard ships on the high seas and small boats deep in enemy infested jungle rivers." That last part is Vietnam. Nielsen served in the brown-water Navy, the small-craft patrols that fought along the Mekong Delta's rivers and canals — about as far from a quiet seascape as a sailor could get.

He came home and built a career around the sea anyway. From a studio in a historic building near the town square in Carrollton, Georgia — shared with his artist wife, Jan, the loft above as their home — he painted for more than fifty years: crashing surf, low-country marshes, coastal light, and portraits on commission. He became a signature member of the American Society of Marine Artists and sat on its board. In 2004, Georgia's governor handed Nielsen's paintings of the Marshes of Glynn to the world leaders gathered for the G8 summit on Sea Island.

But Nielsen reached far more people through a piece most of his collectors never saw him make. Among the public commissions his studio singled out were two: a commemorative medallion for the U.S. Congress, and a single silver dollar for the U.S. Mint. He died on December 10, 2018.

A painter and a coin designer face the same problem from opposite ends. A painting can use a hundred shades to carry a feeling. A coin gets one metal, a disc 38 millimeters across, and relief — the height the design rises off the surface — measured in fractions of a millimeter. The whole story has to land in a single image.

Here, the assignment was personal in a way few are. A Navy man who had served in a war was asked to design a coin honoring Americans who had been held captive in one. His answer was a bald eagle breaking free. On the obverse — the heads side — the bird takes flight through a ring of barbed wire, a broken chain still trailing from one leg. There's no slogan doing the work; the picture is the argument. Captivity, and the exact moment it ends. The only words around it are LIBERTY, FREEDOM, and IN GOD WE TRUST — and the eagle says all three.

Like nearly every Mint commemorative, the coin was a partnership. Nielsen drew it; a staff sculptor-engraver, Alfred Maletsky, translated the drawing into the three-dimensional model and the dies — the hardened steel stamps the press strikes from — deciding exactly how high the eagle's wing should stand off the field. The reverse, showing the planned National Prisoner of War Museum, was designed and sculpted by Mint artist Edgar Z. Steever IV.

That reverse is why the coin exists. It was issued under the United States Veterans Commemorative Coin Act of 1993, and the surcharge built into every coin's price was earmarked for the museum — the law sent the first three million dollars raised to the Interior Department to help build it. The museum opened at the Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia on April 9, 1998 — chosen as the anniversary of the fall of Bataan in 1942 — on the ground where one of the deadliest Civil War prison camps once stood, less than two hundred miles from Nielsen's own studio.