Elsie Stevens, Audrey Munson, and the Model for the 1916 Dime and Half Dollar

Competing Claims

IN A NOTE to her edition of Letters of Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens states that her mother, Elsie Stevens, was the model for both the 1916 US dime and the 1916 US half dollar. Commenting on the new apartment at 441 West 21st Street in New York City, which Wallace Stevens had found in August 1909 for the soon-to-be married couple, Holly Stevens claims that four years later their landlord, the sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman, "persuaded Mrs. Stevens to pose for him. The design he made, using her head, won the competition for a design for the new dime and half-dollar issued by the U.S. Treasury Department in 1916" (L 155n2). Holly Stevens's assertion has been taken at face value, and it has been perpetuated numerous times by Stevens scholars, including myself, and others.¹ Is Holly Stevens's statement correct?

Others have proposed different models. Diane Rozas and Anita Bourne Gottehrer in their book, American Venus: The Extraordinary Life of Audrey Munson, Model and Muse, identify Audrey Munson as the model for both coins. James Bone in The Curse of Beauty: The Scandalous and Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America's First Supermodel states that Munson claimed to be on the dime and played a role in the half dollar. Although there are discrepancies, both biographies relate the same account of how Munson became the most sought-after model during America's Beaux-Arts movement. She and her mother were walking in New York when a photographer noticed the teenager and asked whether he could photograph her. Her mother consented and, after a few photo sessions, the photographer shared his images with artist friends, who then engaged Munson to pose for them. With a letter of introduction from one of the painters, Munson visited the studio of the sculptor Isidore Konti. Konti, who had been working on a commission but could never find the proper model to complete it, was enthralled by Munson's nearly perfect proportions and graceful features. He immediately asked her to pose nude and to hold several positions. The result was Konti's sensuous Three Graces (1909), in marble, which adorned the newly added ballroom of the Hotel Astor.² A few months later, perhaps in October 1909, Konti introduced Munson to Adolph Weinman. Elegantly tall with wavy black hair and possessing classically ideal features, she instantly became a favorite of Weinman's, who used her as a model for numerous sculptures over the years. Although Weinman never disclosed the name of the model for the 1916 dime and half dollar, Rozas and Gottehrer report, "A neighbor from Audrey's hometown recalls hearing her admit to having posed for the coins" (38).³ Indicating Munson clearly believed she was the model, at least for the dime, Bone discovered that the nursing staff taking care of her in her later years nicknamed her "the Dime Lady" (280). On one occasion, Munson pressed a Winged Liberty dime into a nurse's hand as a memento. The nurse, Joanne Poore, who took care of Munson for fifteen years, is convinced that Munson was the model: "That's her profile—and I know her profile" (qtd. in Bone 281). Is this evidence persuasive?

Roger W. Burdette, a research specialist on US coins and the author of several award-winning books on numismatics, records in detail the 1916 competition for the US dime, quarter, and half dollar in Renaissance of American Coinage, 1916–1921. Although Burdette concedes that Elsie Stevens's profile is represented in part on the dime, he concludes, "The primary prototype for the portrait on the dime was probably Weinman's Union Soldiers and Sailors Memorial dedicated on November 6, 1909 in Baltimore, Maryland. When photos of the dime are compared with the head of Victory from the Memorial, the resemblance is unmistakable" (35). Burdette does not believe that Elsie Stevens is represented on the half dollar: "Obverse [head] of the half dollar appears to be loosely based on Louis-Oscar Roty's Sower as interpreted on the...