02 February 2009
A New Look for Lincoln
This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB).
By: Meghan Loftus
Meghan Loftus is an intern at the Bureau of International Information Programs.
The billions of U.S. pennies that will be produced in 2009 are getting a makeover. The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC) and the U.S. Mint recently unveiled four new designs for the reverse side of the one-cent coin to celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday.
The new pennies will be released periodically throughout the year. The obverse side, or “heads,” will remain the same: Victor David Brenner’s profile of Lincoln has been on the front of the penny since the 1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth. The reverse side, or “tails,” has been redesigned twice since that time. But in 2009 the design will change four times to represent four periods in Lincoln’s life: his early childhood in Kentucky, his young adulthood in Indiana, his career as a lawyer and legislator in Illinois, and his time as president in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. Congress, which is the only body that can authorize changes to coins, passed legislation for the redesign in 2005. Designs for the pennies were submitted by sculptor-engravers at the U.S. Mint and through the Artistic Infusion Program, a group of outside artists under contract to the Mint. The designs were reviewed by the ALBCBC, the Citizen Coin Advisory Committee, and the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reviewed their recommendations and selected the final designs.
Richard Masters’ depiction of a log cabin was one of the designs selected by Secretary Paulson for the series. Masters had been a coin enthusiast as a boy and had also collected coins for the Cub Scouts while working for a merit badge. But he never pictured himself as a coin designer, much less a master designer with the Artistic Infusion Program, which he is today.
Nor as a child did Masters think about the design process, figuring the renderings on the coins just magically appeared. “Someone, somewhere decides what to put on these,” he remembers thinking.
Decades later, he is that someone. Masters used the historical narrative provided by the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission as a starting point to craft his image illustrating Lincoln’s birth and early childhood in Kentucky. “I thought it [the log cabin] would be an image most Americans recognized,” says Masters, who is also an associate professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
One of the most difficult parts of the design was the scale. An artist’s vision may have to be shrunk to fit within a coin’s small diameter. “The challenge here was really to stay focused on the primary element,” says Masters.
Still other changes are to come. Congress has mandated that, beginning in 2010, the reverse side of the penny feature a yet-to-be-determined image of Lincoln’s “preservation of the United States of America as a single and united country.”
