William Marks Simpson

For two crowded years in the late 1930s, William Marks Simpson shaped how Americans pictured their own history in silver. He designed three commemorative half dollars — small coins struck to honor an event or anniversary rather than for everyday change — and on one of them he made something that still earns praise nearly a century later.

His path into art was an odd one. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, on August 24, 1903, he first went to the Virginia Military Institute — a soldier's school, not an art academy — and took a Bachelor of Arts there in 1924. Only afterward did he turn to sculpture in earnest.

He trained at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, part of the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, and in 1930 he won the Prix de Rome — the prize that sent the best young American sculptors of his generation to study at the American Academy in Rome. He came home with the classical, figure-first training that shows in every coin he touched.

By the mid-1930s Simpson had a Baltimore studio and a partner in it: the sculptor Marjorie Emory Simpson, also a Rinehart graduate, whom he married in 1936. He taught at the Maryland Institute and later directed it, and in the 1950s he taught back at his old military college. When the federal government needed designs for new commemorative coins, it turned to him three times in barely a year.

The war then pulled him out of the studio entirely. Simpson served with the U.S. Army in the Pacific from 1942 to 1946, where he put his hands to a different kind of work — designing the Guadalcanal American memorial and decorative grille-work for Army headquarters in Honolulu — and earned the Army Commendation Medal. He died on October 22, 1958.

Simpson's coins all come from one narrow window — designs drawn in 1936 and 1937 — and they share a sculptor's instinct: reach for the human figure before the heraldic emblem. The reverse, the tails side, is usually where he did his best thinking.

His finest work is the reverse of the Roanoke Island half dollar (1937), struck for the 350th anniversary of England's doomed "Lost Colony" on the North Carolina coast. It shows Eleanor Dare holding her infant daughter, Virginia Dare — the first English child born in the Americas — with two period sailing ships behind them. The image didn't come from a book. Simpson visited the Wright Brothers memorial on the Carolina coast, watched the guard's wife there holding her own baby and looking out to sea, and built the figure from what he saw. He wanted, he wrote, "the young woman holding her child close to her breast gazing far off to the horizon beyond the ships." The art historian Cornelius Vermeule later called the reverse "a pure, twentieth-century Neoclassic concept of motherhood." (Vermeule was not won over by everything — he thought the coin carried too much lettering, in too many sizes — but on the mother and child, the verdict has stayed warm.)

The same year brought the Battle of Antietam half dollar, marking 75 years since the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. Simpson did something rare: he put the two opposing commanders, Robert E. Lee and George McClellan, together on the obverse — the heads side — as conjoined busts both facing left, enemies sharing one frame. On the reverse he placed Burnside's Bridge, the stone crossing where Antietam Creek ran red. He finished his models in April 1937; the Commission of Fine Arts — the federal panel that vets coin and monument designs — approved them the same day, its sculptor member Paul Manship offering only minor suggestions. President Franklin Roosevelt was handed the first specimen on August 12, 1937.

His third coin, the Norfolk, Virginia, Bicentennial half dollar, was a true partnership with his wife Marjorie. It honored Norfolk's own past — 200 years since the town became a royal borough, 100 since it became a city. Husband and wife leaned hard on civic emblems: the city seal with its three-masted ship on the obverse, and on the reverse the ceremonial royal mace topped by a British crown. That last detail gives the coin a singular distinction — it is often called the only U.S. coin to depict the British crown. It also pulled Simpson away from what he did best. Critics savaged the busy obverse; the collector and author Q. David Bowers called it "the most cluttered commemorative design ever produced." Vermeule, noting the coin was the work of a married couple, landed the famous line that "the coin gives ample evidence that two heads need not be better than one." Where Simpson's gift was the single, still figure, here it gave way to clutter.