SOTHEBY'S SELLS ANCIENT BUST SAID TO BE MODEL FOR BARBER'S COINAGE

LOT 38 PROPERTY FROM THE STACK FAMILY COLLECTION A MONUMENTAL MARBLE HEAD OF A GODDESS, ROMAN IMPERIAL, CIRCA 1 ST CENTURY A.D. probably Aphrodite, Hera, or an Empress in the guise of a goddess, her centrally parted wavy hair bound in a laurel wreath and surmounted by a stephane decorated in relief with alternating rosettes and lotus buds, the bust and back of the head restored in marble.

Height with bust 19 1/2 in. ESTIMATE 20,000 - 30,000 USD

Although Theodore Roosevelt is famous for having railed against the "atrocious hideousness" of United States coin designs, and commissioned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create coinage "worthy of the ancients," in fact United States coin designers had long relied on antique prototypes. The specific sources for virtually all these earlier efforts, however, have been lost.

In 1881, Charles E. Barber, the Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, began to design a series of pattern coins for subsidiary coinage, one cent to five cents; all bore the same classically inspired head of Liberty. The design for the five cent denomination was refined over the next year, and was finally adopted for circulation in 1883. It became known as the "Liberty head nickel" or "Barber nickel" after its designer. Millions were struck for circulation through 1912.

The inspiration for Barber's head of Liberty appears to have been derived from the present bust. Cornelius Vermeule in Numismatic Art in America (1971) noted the increased reliance on Roman cult-statues for inspiration by engravers since 1849. He further observed that Barber's "diademed and wreathed head of Liberty on the obverse was modeled almost verbatim from a Greco-Roman head of Juno or a major personification...." and that "the very head said to have been used as the model for this nickel...is the centerpiece in the entrance salon of the premises of Messrs. Stack...."

Vermeule continued that the head, "a Greco-Roman restyling of a Greek head of the fourth century B.C." had been on display at the Philadelphia Academy of Art from the Civil War until the First World War, and that is was here that Barber, along with other Mint artists found their inspiration and "turned its full, grave if not heavy profile into designs for the coinage."

The head later passed through a number of private collections, and was at one time in the possession of the renowned Philadelphia coin dealers S.H. and H. Chapman whose partnership lasted from 1878 to 1906. Henry Chapman, the younger of the two brothers was well-acquainted with Barber. Chapman died in 1935, and the head is believed to have come into the Stack family's possession shortly thereafter.

Although Barber took ample license in his rendering, a comparison of Barber's nickel with the head's profile faithfully replicates the divinity's slightly curving nose (from restoration). Vermeule summed up their relationship as "what some modern critics would consider a dull, academic standard of classical divinity in visual form became a keystone in the redesigned denominations of American coinage."

To read the complete sale catalog, see: Egyptian, Classical, and Western Asiatic Antiquities New York , Thu, 10 Dec 09, 2:00 PM, N08603 (catalogue.sothebys.com/auctions/N08603/pdf_lowres/N08603-catalogue.pdf)

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