Spooky Coins
Steve: A favorite painting of mine at the Detroit Institute of Arts is The Nightmare, a large 1781 oil on canvas work by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. A recently published book Creator of Nightmares by Christopher Baker explores this work and a review in the Wall Street Journal called it, “A study in darkness and dreams, the painting shows its ethereal, slumbering heroine surmounted by an incubus and an utterly strange., glassy-eyed horse head, the latter of which must have been – though I’ve never seen it confirmed – the basis for the iconic scene in The Godfather.”
There’s a suggestion of violence in it and as the reviewer Maxwell Carter explains, “its supreme horror lies in perspective. The maiden’s elongated form is sheet-white and corpselike, her proportions ever so slightly off. The horse is jarring yet, with its daft grin and blank stare, lacks menace.”
I’ve long compared the three figures in this painting to numismatic depictions. The horse head, in its odd isolation, reminds me of the weird, primitive horses on New Jersey colonial coins. The monster evokes something primitive and sinister, while the draped woman could be propped up and repositioned like Liberty on the Walking Liberty half dollar or the Standing Liberty quarter dollar.
Once a coin has been listed in generations of the Red Book it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. Take Leonardo da Vinci’s painting in the Louvre: the Mona Lisa. Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance painter and historian said, “There was a smile so pleasant that it was more divine than human to see.” Reproductions have made the painting ubiquitous so much so that visitors to the famed Paris museum line up 15-people deep to get a snapshot of the smiling woman protected behind bulletproof glass. (Perhaps akin to a coin protected by a slab where one can get close, but not truly experience it).
Dennis, have you looked at any coins with fresh eyes of late?
Dennis: Fuseli’s Nightmare painting is one that makes an impression the first time you see it, and definitely sticks in your mind afterward. I don’t remember the first time I laid eyes on its weirdling blind horse and leering monster (probably in a book of ghost stories), but I was young and it freaked me out.
I’ve never looked at horses, monkeys, or voluptuously languishing women the same since.
(And now that you’ve made the mental connection, it’ll be hard to “unsee” it on New Jersey’s colonial coppers!)
The United States Mint has begun to unveil a program that gives us all a chance to see familiar old coins with fresh eyes. It’s the 2026 “Best of the Mint” collection, which celebrates a handful of the most famous, most popular, and most beloved U.S. coin designs of the past. The coins themselves—modern gold productions of the Winged Liberty (Mercury) dime, the 1804 dollar, and others—will interest and excite some collectors, and, frankly, will bore others. The Mint has already recreated the three 1916 silver coins (in 2016, for their centennial), and has celebrated Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s remarkable double-eagle design on gold bullion coins since 1986, and on an ultra-high-relief production in 2009.
The 2026 coins will be rolled out as part of the national Semiquincentennial—the 250th anniversary of our independence—so they should enjoy a hearty helping of mainstream headlines, and will give many “non-collector” Americans a chance to own these classic coin designs in beautiful pure gold.
Many numismatists, though, have already started to react with either “not this again” boredom, or disgruntled “now I have to buy these same old designs” fear-of-missing-out frustration.
(Personally, I look forward to seeing the “new/old” 2026 coins because I know the Mint is continuously improving and fine-tuning its technical expertise, and the 2026 productions will have differences from the 2016s.)
But let’s set the coins aside for a moment. The truly innovative reimagining of these well-known designs—the part of the “Best of the Mint” that lets us see the coins with fresh eyes—is in the silver-medal portion of the program. These medals will blow the lid off the pot and make this a true numismatic celebration of America’s great coinage. Each of the five designs will be interpreted and re-envisioned, reinvented, by some of our most creative living artists. This is the part of the program that has collectors really talking!
We’re used to seeing the Mercury dime as an obverse and a reverse . . . a winged-helmeted profile portrait of Mercury, and an ancient Roman fasces. For the silver medal, the artist asks, “What is the Mercury dime about? What does the coin say? What does it tell us, how did it exist in the world then, and what does it mean today?” Every familiar old coin in the “Best of the Mint” suite will experience this creative explosion and rebirth. Whether we hate or love any particular design that comes out in the silver medals, each of them will be a ticket to imagination, and a free pair of new eyes. Kudos to the Mint for this brave experiment.
Be on the lookout for another installment of Collecting Friends next month or subscribe here and never miss a post! In the meantime, explore beautiful coins from the ANA's Edward C. Rochette Money Museum Virtual Exhibits.
Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, former Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
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