Design
All three denominations of the Barber coinage depict a head of Liberty, facing right. She wears a pileus, a crown fashioned from an olive branch, and a small headband inscribed "Liberty". On the quarter and half dollar, the motto "In God We Trust" appears above her head; she is otherwise surrounded with 13 six-pointed stars and the date. On the dime, her head is surrounded with "United States of America" and the year. The reverse of the quarter and half dollar depicts a heraldic eagle, based on the Great Seal. The bird holds in its mouth a scroll inscribed "E Pluribus Unum" and in its right claws an olive branch; in its left it holds 13 arrows. Above the eagle are 13 five-pointed stars; it is surrounded by the name of the country and by the coin's denomination. The reverse of the dime depicts a wreath of corn, wheat, maple and oak leaves surrounding the words "One Dime". Barber's monogram "B" is on the cutoff of Liberty's neck; the mint mark, on the dime, is placed beneath the wreath on the reverse and beneath the eagle on the larger denominations.
Barber's head of Liberty is purely classical, and is rendered in the Roman style. The head is modeled after the French "Ceres" silver coinage of the late 19th century, but bears a resemblance to Morgan's design for the silver dollar. This did not escape numismatist Walter Breen in his comprehensive guide to US coins, "Barber must have been feeling unusually lazy. He left the rev design as it had been since 1860, with minor simplifications. His obv was a mirror image of the Morgan dollar head, with much of Miss Anna Willess Williams's back hair cropped off, the rest concealed ... within a disproportionately large cap." In his text introducing the Barber quarter, Breen states, "the whole composition is Germanically stolid, prosy, crowded (especially on rev), and without discernible merit aside from the technical one of low relief". Burdette terms Barber's designs, "typically mediocre imitations of the current French-style—hardly better than the arcane seated Liberty type they replaced".
Art historian Cornelius Vermeule, in his work on US coins, took a more positive view of Barber's coinage, "the last word as to their aesthetic merits has yet to be written. Little admired or collected for more than three generations after their appearance, these essentially conservative but most dignified coins have suddenly become extremely popular with collectors". Vermeule argued that "the designs of Barber's coins were more attuned to the times than he perhaps realized. The plumpish, matronly gravitas of Liberty had come to America seven years earier in the person of Frédéric Bartholdi's giant statue ... " He suggested that the features of Daniel Chester French's huge statue Republic, created for the 1892 World Columbian Exposition "were absolutely in harmony with what Charles Barber had created for the coinage in the year of the Fair's opening".
Read more about this topic: United States Barber Coinage
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