America’s Most Inconspicuous Artist
Hundreds of millions of Americans have seen and interacted with Victor D. Brenner’s artwork without ever having heard of him.
As you may have heard, the U.S. Mint has officially stopped producing pennies. I understand the reasoning behind this move — nobody spends pennies anymore, and manufacturing them costs three times as much as the coins’ face value, so it no longer makes sense to make cents. But news of the penny’s demise still made me a bit melancholy, because I collected pennies as a kid, beginning when I was about nine years old. And that means I know about a classically inconspicuous guy named Victor D. Brenner, who I want to talk about today.
Brenner was a sculptor who created the design for the Lincoln penny, which went on to become one of the most ubiquitous and iconic images in American life. The coin went into circulation in 1909 to coincide with the the Great Emancipator’s 100th birthday, so it’s been in use for 116 years — the longest run for a coin design in American history. During that time, Brenner’s artwork has been reproduced billions of times and seen by hundreds of millions of people, even though most of them haven’t known his name. He’s like the Charles Brannock of loose change.
Of course, the designers of our other coins aren’t household names either. But Brenner is unique because he’s at the heart of one of the most notable chapters in the annals of American coin collecting. When he created the Lincoln penny’s front design (or the obverse, as they say in the coin biz), he also created the “wheat stalk” design for the back (or reverse). Like any artist, he wanted to sign his work, so he included his initials — V.D.B. — in between the wheat stalks at the base of the reverse.
It wasn’t unusual for American coin designs to include a designer’s initials. For example, the Lincoln penny’s predecessor, the Indian head penny, had a tiny sideways “L” for its designer, James Barton Longacre. But many observers at the time considered Brenner’s initials to be too prominent and ostentatious, especially on a coin meant to honor Lincoln. The outcry quickly led Treasury Secretary Franklin MacVeagh to have Brenner’s initials scrubbed from the design during the penny’s first month of production (additional info here). By that time, however, some coins with the initials had already been struck at the Philadelphia and San Francisco mints and had entered the nation’s coinage supply. By the end of 1909, the penny production numbers for the two mints looked like this:
Philadelphia: 28 million with initials, 72.7 million without.
San Francisco: 484,000 with initials, 1.8 million without.
Since the pennies with Brenner’s initials were less plentiful and somewhat controversial, they quickly became collector’s items. That backstory was like catnip to nine-year-old me (and, I’m fairly certain, to lots of other kids over the years). It activated my nascent collecting instincts and was like the gateway drug that got me interested in the hobby. I bought one of those blue Whitman albums to house my growing penny collection, and of course I was especially keen to fill the spots for the two 1909 V.D.B. editions. Did I succeed? I still have my album, so let’s take a look: