Last week, we saw the graphically chaotic mess of the U.S. Treasury's first currency designs in the 1860s. By 1890 the U.S. $1 bill was still all over the place, from a graphic design standpoint:
But by that same year, the $5 bill was taking on a shape remarkably similar to the one many of us grew up using. It has a centralized portrait within an oval frame and a symbol in each corner (though they're still hanging onto that Roman numeral thing).
Cool as it is, that bill remained a design anomaly and the centralized portrait would not become a standard design element for decades, though it would make an occasional appearance.
Later in the decade, however, money really started to get cool. In the late 1880s Congress had authorized the creation of special bills backed by silver, and by 1893—after a presumably exhaustive search—the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing finally settled on a small group of artists with the skillz to create these new Awesome Sauce bills. As we saw in a previous entry, carving intricate images into metal takes forever, and it wasn't unitl 1896 that their kick-ass Silver Certificate bills were ready to go. They were unlike any that had come before:
That there is the front, which is so artsy it's got a name: History Instructing Youth.
Will H. Low's design for the $1 note, entitled History Instructing Youth, shows a female History with a young student standing beside her, gesturing to an open book of history before her. An olive branch rests against the book, holding it open to show the Constitution of the United States upon the page. Both the Washington Memorial and the Capitol Dome can be seen in the background landscape. The outside border of the note shows 23 wreaths, each bearing the name of a noteworthy American - not surprisingly starting with Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but also including such names as poet Henry Longfellow, inventor Robert Fulton, and author Nathaniel Hawthorne, among many others. The seal of the Treasury appears in the lower right.
Here's the flip side, done by different artists in the crew than Low, who probably had his hands full with the front:
The back of the 1896 $1, featuring intricate geometric lathe work and a winged, shield-bearing Liberty in each of the upper corners, carries traditionally-styled portraits of both George and Martha Washington. The portraits were engraved by Alfred Sealey and Charles Burt, respectively, and the overall design of the back was the work of Thomas F. Morris.
Take a closer look at how exquisitely intricate the carving was:
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