1911 $20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle NGC MS63 (CAC)

      This is a low mintage example of a highly collectable year of the ever-popular Saint-Gaudens $20 gold double eagle. With a mintage of 197,250, mint state Philadelphia specimens are much harder to come by than the more populous Denver and San Francisco examples. This is a great type coin to include in your collection of United States gold coins. Also, if you would like to have just one really nice-looking gold coin for your collection, this would be a good choice, as it is not overly expensive.

      Wrote President Theodore Roosevelt to Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Leslie Mortier Shaw on December 27, 1904, “I think our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness. Would it be possible, without asking permission of Congress, to employ a man like Saint-Gaudens to give a coinage that would have some beauty?”

      Two weeks later, on the evening of January 12,1905, acclaimed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was in the White House enjoying a glass of wine before dining with Roosevelt and Shaw. The two men—the president and the artist—had an enthusiastic, animated conversation about the beauty of high-relief Greek coins. Dinner saw the three men discussing a scheme for redesigning the cent, the eagle (gold $10) and the double eagle (gold $20), all behind the back of U.S. Mint Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber. “I would have the Mint stamp modern versions of those Greek coins in spite of itself,” said Roosevelt, if the honored sculptor would design them. “You know, Saint-Gaudens, this is my pet crime.” Saint-Gaudens' double eagle saw its debut in 1907.

      Numismatic scholar and art critic Cornelius Vermeule writes, "The double eagle is perhaps the most majestic coin ever to bear our national imprint. The Liberty striding forward is as grand in miniature as the Hellenistic Victory of Samothrace on a heroic scale. The eagle in flight against the sun on the reverse achieves complete domination of motion and expanding vista over the confines of a tiny tondo. Although the authorities at the Mint flattened the relief to facilitate striking and handling, this coin has remained a forceful demonstration that modern, mechanical coinage need in no way be pedestrian." Discussing both Saint-Gaudens' $10 eagle along with his $20 double eagle, Vermeule writes, "Both coins seems as modern a century after they were conceived as any issues, American or otherwise, produced in the past generation, and compared with what has been tolerated heretofore in the United States, both burst as artistic skyrockets in the horizons of our academic creativity."