Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Introduction
When you buy bullion gold coins for gold coin investing, you should take a moment and consider the man who sculpted that coin.
If what you’re investing in happens to be the Golden Eagle coin, that man was Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1848, Saint-Gaudens’ family moved to the US while he was still fairly young, and he was raised in New York. Said to be the artist who most embodies the ideals of the American Renaissance art movement, Saint-Gaudens brought an unprecedented level of craftsmanship, detail, and design to his work.
With no disrespect intended towards his forbearers, to look at the quality of the sculptures put out by American artists before, and after Augustus Saint-Gaudens, they are as different as night and day. Saint-Gaudens’ approach literally revolutionized American art, bringing to the forefront a kind of lifelike realism.
The reason Gaudens’ gold coins are so popular for gold coin investing has as much to do with their metallic content as with their artistic content, as it was entirely thanks to their popularity amongst numismatists as “the most beautiful coins ever minted in the US” that the Mint chose to reproduce and circulate investor grade copies for those who wanted to invest in gold coins.
Soon, we will see a mint of laser etched, ultra high relief coins based on the original 1933 Golden Eagles designed by Saint-Gaudens. This should be something of a revelation, and that may well be an understatement. The certified gold coins we’ve been collecting for years now have been based on the results of fairly antiquated striking methods. The coming coins will be much, much closer to what Augustus Saint-Gaudens originally sculpted, and we should a whole new level of detail and beauty that we’ve been missing out on all these years.
When you purchase gold coins, it’s a good idea to keep the majority of them locked up in a safe place such as a wall safe or a safety deposit box. However, don’t forget that the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Golden Eagles are works of art, and art is meant to be seen.
It might seem a tad silly to put a gold coin up in a big picture frame on your wall, but when you get a chance, take one of your Golden Eagles, grab a magnifying glass, and take a moment to admire the exquisite detail, even if you’ve already done this a few times.
It’s said that you cannot be a coin investor without also being a coin buff. Even if you only set out to keep your money safe with certified rare and gold coins, you wind up being lured into the whole culture of coin trading. The legends surrounding the coins, the history. It would probably be equally true to say that you can’t be a coin investor without also becoming something of an art buff.
When you begin reading about the Saint-Gaudens coins, that will lead you to reading about Saint-Gaudens himself and the American renaissance, the ideas that influenced Saint-Gaudens and his colleagues, the influence he’s had since. This is, perhaps, the most rewarding aspect of being a coin investor.
Leslie McAdams
April 5, 2009
