Collecting Friends: The Challenge of a Portrait

The Challenge of a Portrait

Steve: Jonathan Yeo’s striking portrait of King Charles III, unveiled during the summer of 2024, has sparked ongoing discussion about the art of royal portraiture. Royal portraits are typically traditional, predictable and represent the power of the throne more than the personality of the sitter. The official portrait of King Charles III shows him standing in his Welsh Guards uniform, hands on a sword, with a bit of a grin. A butterfly hovers over his shoulder. His face is isolated in a field of red. 

Royal portraits are typically full of symbolism and heraldry, and here the butterfly represents Charles’s metamorphosis from prince to King: it connects to his love of the environment, according to the artist. The use of red – which elicits strong emotions from viewers – suggests the conflicts in the role of a modern monarch and that a ruler sits in a hot seat. 

People who view the portrait have some pointed responses, saying that it suggests that the monarchy is going up in flames, or that the subject is bathing in blood. Yeo wanted to produce a more modern royal portrait than his more traditional portraits of the king’s father, Prince Philip and Queen Camilla. 

Despite the hullabaloo surrounding the portrait, viewers haven’t challenged that the face looks like King Charles III, which is one of the key goals of a portrait. Beyond conveying broad ideas of power, a portrait should also be recognizable as to the individual depicted. 

This made me start thinking about portraits on coins. The best, like Victor David Brenner’s Lincoln cent that was introduced in 1909, are stately and representational; easily identifiable by relating to both the actual appearance and a viewer’s memory of the sitter. Brenner’s use of familiar, historic photographs as the source facilitates this. 

Victor David Brenner’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln, here used on a plaque, was based on photographs and an adaptation was used on the Lincoln cent which began production in 1909. The portrait continues today on the cent.

Some modern designs miss the mark. I’ve always found the 1995 Special Olympics World Games silver dollar featuring a portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics, as one of the less successful portraits. Shriver’s image is not well-known by the public, and the image is representational, but doesn’t suggest her achievements or character. Only when looking at the reverse, with an image of the Special Olympics Medal, a rose and a long quote from Shriver does her connection with the event being celebrated make sense. 

The use of a portrait on one side and a reverse design that relates to the attributes of the sitter is seen on Roman coins and was revived in the Italian Renaissance, but the portraits typically provide some glimpse of the inner life of the person depicted. 

Dennis, are there any depictions of individuals on coins that you think are particularly well-done, or less so? 

Dennis: Somewhere in my German Imperial collection, I have a particular high-relief portrait medal of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It does all the things you describe as important for a royal likeness. The emperor is decked out in his finest Prussian military uniform, symbolizing the strength of the army and its supreme importance in Germany’s strongest royal state. Wilhelm stares regally from the medal, as if challenging the viewer. It’s a commanding design and an excellent likeness—marred by only one weakness: the sculpture’s relief is very high, and the Kaiser’s nose is its peak. At some point in the past hundred-plus years the medal suffered some unlucky wear, just enough to rub down the tip of the imperial schnozz, giving Kaiser Wilhelm a clown nose.

Back to U.S. coins. You remember California-based medallic artist Heidi Wastweet was on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee when you and I served together in 2016. I recall Heidi occasionally warning the Mint’s artists against forward-facing portraits. The portrait-sitter, after a few years of wear in circulation, risked ending up with a pig snout. Something for a coin or medal designer to keep in mind!

On modern U.S. coinage, it seems to me that President Franklin D. Roosevelt has had his ups and downs. If you lift his portrait off the current dime (minted 1946 to date) and present it out of context, how many Americans would identify it as our former commander-in-chief? Probably not many. No fault of designer John R. Sinnock; I think it’s actually a very good likeness of Roosevelt. But as time marches on and our collective visual memory fades, coin portraits can lose some of their immediacy, their instant recognition. Unless you’re in your eighties or older, Roosevelt died before you were born. What would help guide today’s viewer? Maybe putting FDR’s initials on the coin. Or a more caricatured portrait, with helpful “visual shorthand” props like the president’s famous cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, and his pince-nez glasses.

Image: FDR as generations of Americans knew him—hat, pince-nez glasses, cigarette holder, and an air of confidence.

Coin designer Joe Menna wasn’t able to use any of those props in his 2014 Presidential dollar portrait of Roosevelt. He faced the same challenges Sinnock did in 1945. FDR’s essence is tough to capture in a single view. In a Numismatic News blog in August 2014, Dave Harper wrote, “I do not think the portrait on the new dollar coin looks like FDR. It resembles FDR, but it just does not look like him.” Dave suggested it was closer to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

On the other hand, T. James Ferrell’s small portrait of the president on the bridge of the USS Houston, for a 1997 five-dollar gold commemorative, features more visual cues than the dime or the dollar. FDR is wearing his glasses. His jutting chin is more prominent. He wears the naval boat-cloak seen in some of his most famous photographs. These props help us identify the president. All that’s missing is his cigarette and his dog Fala.

FDR on the 1997 five-dollar gold commemorative.

As Dave Harper observed in 2014, complaining about a coin’s design doesn’t stop collectors from collecting. In fact, he said, “All coin collectors are art critics.” I would add that all coin designs deserve critique—not complaint, necessarily, but analysis and assessment. It’s a skill that every collector can sharpen, and it helps us appreciate the coins we collect.

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.

About the Collecting Friends Blog

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, 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! 

About the American Numismatic Association

The American Numismatic Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect coins and related items. The Association serves collectors, the general public, and academic communities with an interest in numismatics.

The ANA helps all people discover and explore the world of money through its vast array of educational programs including its museum, library, publications, conventions and numismatic seminars.