The year 1932 marked the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth and the U.S. Mint planned for a new silver quarter dollar with a portrait of the nation’s first president on the obverse, alongside an eagle on the reverse. Several artists participated in a 1931 competition to design this new issue, and ultimately, sculptor John Flanagan was victorious.

Stack’s Bowers Galleries offered a selection of various artist’s models that were submitted to that competition in its August auctions. The models show how different artists interpreted the project’s challenge to adapt a bust by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon into coin form.

The Commission of Fine Arts twice declared Laura Gardin Fraser the winner. Fraser’s design was not chosen by that contest’s final judge, Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, but was revived for the $5 commemorative gold coin issued in 1999 to honor the bicentennial of Washington’s death. It was again honored when chosen in 2022 for use as the common obverse for the Washington, American Women circulating quarter dollar series.

Chester Beach

Sculptor Chester Beach is well-known to numismatists for his 1923-S Monroe Doctrine Centennial commemorative half dollar. Beach’s design for the design competition for the 1932 quarter dollar is distinguished with bold lettering and a wide rim. Stack’s Bowers offered a plaster design for the obverse that was part of Chester Beach’s studio collection. It realized $9,200 in 2009, but its Aug. 17 reoffering saw it sell for $3,360. A negative plaster, showing the design in reverse, sold for $384, with the cataloger calling it, “Not as impressive as the positive plaster offered in the previous lot due to the retrograde format, but an important part of the design process, rare and interesting.”

John Flanagan

Realizing $9,000 was a pair of positive plasters, bronzed, attributed to Flanagan. The cataloger called this design, “vastly more original,” commenting, “The eagle of the rejected reverse offered here may remind viewers familiar with the country’s World War II philatelic history of the long-lived Win the War three-cent stamp with its streamlined, raised-wing eagle.”

When offered at Stack’s Bowers in 2009, that cataloger described the distinctive reverse as follows: “modernistic eagle with a short body, pronounced head and neck nearly the same size and exceptionally large legs between enormous raised wings extending through the legend. The bird firmly grasps fasces complete with down-turned axe blade wholly unlike that on the adopted design.”

The design is illustrated in Cornelius Vermeule’s book Numismatic Art in America where the curator observed that the artists in the competition had issues in humanizing the Houdon bust, noting, “There is something cold and lifeless about the results.”

Also attributed to John Flanagan were a pair of bronze models, assigned to the artist based on their overall style, with the cataloger noting that, “they show more vitality and originality than his adopted design.” The pair of attributed bronzes sold for $6,600.

Winfred Grandy, other

Other designs offered in the session included two positive plasters by Winfred Grandy with a rather awkward design that were painted silver, to better approximate how the resulting coin might look. Grandy had entered Yale Art School in 1926, studying sculpture, and graduated in 1931.

A pair of plaster models by an unidentified sculptor, one featuring Washington in civil dress on one, and the other, for the reverse, a handsome eagle’s head, sold for $1,560.

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