The most striking feature of the legal tender notes of the Irish Free State and the early issues of the Central Bank of Ireland is the portrait of Lady Lavery. While the portrait of Lady Lavery is well known, it was never intended that her image should be recognized on the Irish notes that circulated from 1928 until the late 1970s. The original intent was that the vignette on the notes should depict a typical Irish Cailín (Girl). However, the intention was lost and history records that an American lady adorns the notes. How did this happen?

In 1921 the Irish Free State was established. After several years it was decided to reform the currency issued in Ireland as, until that time, banknotes were issued by the commercial banks—as they are today in Scotland and Northern Ireland. These notes were not legal tender, they were simply promises to pay by the banks. In 1927 it was decided to introduce legal tender notes and to reform the notes issued by the banks, which were to become ‘The Consolidated Banknotes’. (The Consolidated Banknotes became known as the ‘Ploughman’ notes, because of the ploughman illustrated on the front of the notes.) The committee chosen to advise on the design of both the Legal Tender Notes and the Consolidated Banknotes was Thomas Bodkin, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dermod O’Brien, President of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and Lucius O’Callaghan, a former Director of the National Gallery.

In late 1927 the ‘Note Committee’ petitioned Sir John Lavery to provide a portrait of an archetypical Irish Cailín to adorn the notes. The choice of Sir John Lavery (1856 – 1941) to provide the portrait was no accident. Born in Belfast, by the 1920s Lavery had become the greatest contemporary portrait painter in Ireland. He had studied in Glasgow, London and Paris, and worked throughout the continent and in England. His works had been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Louvre, and other European galleries. In 1921 he was elected to the Royal Academy and in the late 1920s he was at the height of his success. (more…)

On August 16, the day the new Thomas Jefferson Presidential dollars were released to the public, Chuck Chichinski of Bellefontaine, Ohio, went to his bank and obtained two rolls of the dollars. Having read a report on the www.coins.about.com website that a doubled die reverse existed on the Adams dollar, he quickly went to work to see if any of the new Jeffersons he had obtained had a similar affliction. By the third or fourth coin in his first roll, he discovered that he had found his first Jefferson dollar doubled die reverse! It was similar but more major than the one alluded to on the www.coins.about.com site!

He called me to report his find on the same day and mailed two of the coins to me for attribution on the next day. Upon inspecting one, I found that it was not only a doubled die that was similar to the Adams doubled die that Chichinski had seen in Billy Crawford’s, Die Variety News #9, (the variety alluded to on the www.coins.about.com web site) but that it was almost identical to an earlier find that was reported by my co-columnist, John Wexler in his August 20 Varieties Notebook column that we share alternately in the first and third issues of Coin World every month.

Both the Washington and new Jefferson reverses displayed arrowhead shaped hub doubling (and some traces of hub doubling to the west on the Jefferson dollar) that appear to have their origins in the folds of drapery bunched up on Liberty’s right arm directly below the doubling.

The area of doubling on all the Presidential dollar doubled die varieties reported thus far (which is at least three for the Washington dollar and one for the Adams dollar) represents the virtual dead center of the coin’s design. This is an important key their attribution because specialists believe they are the result of tilted hubs that were seated into proper position during hubbing.

In 1997 when the first doubled die cent was discovered that was produced from dies presumed to be made via the single-squeeze hubbing process, (showing on the coin as a doubled earlobe along with over a dozen other areas of doubling in Lincoln’s hair), I first proposed that a tilted hub seated into position by the force of the single impression of the hub was the most probable cause. Since that time most specialists have come to agree that this is the most probable explanation for most (if not the vast majority) of significant single-squeeze produced doubled dies. (more…)