$20 Saint Gaudens
The $20 Saint Gaudens investment gold piece is a rare coin worth looking into. Yes, the American Eagles you may have in your wall safe are newly minted, and there are thousands of investors out there with coins identical to yours, but the original coin is the $20 Saint Gaudens piece, minted between 1907 and 1933.
The Double Eagle began life in 1849, actually, thanks of course to the California Gold Rush that had just occurred. Before then, the highest denomination placed on a gold coin had been ten dollars, but the sudden abundance of the metal inspired the US Mint to create twenty dollar pieces.
Even then, however, the Double Eagle was largely considered an investor’s coin, rather than one to be used as normal currency. The twenty dollar spending power may not sound like much, but in 1850, it was somewhere in the area of five hundred dollars... That is, if you’re going by denomination. By actual gold value, the coin would be worth something like nine hundred dollars by the average spot price this year. And of course, if you want to talk about the rare coin price of the piece, two hundred thousand dollars would be a fair estimate, as the few known examples of the coin to exist routinely fetch such prices when they go up for auction.
The Double Eagle didn’t become the $20 Saint Gaudens we know and love until 1907, which is why coin investors might say that "the $20 Saint Gaudens ran from 1907 to 1933", when the coin itself actually ran from 1849 to 1933.
The coin’s original "Liberty Coronet" design was never very popular amongst American investors or within numismatics circles. Even today, the earlier coins tend to fetch much smaller bids in auction, even though they are actually rarer than the $20 Saint Gaudens. The reason they’re less popular, in fact, is because they’re in less demand.
As such, the US Mint opted to commission a redesign from renowned sculptor and sketch artist Augustus Saint Gaudens. The coin’s design is widely regarded to be the finest and most beautiful piece of art ever displayed on an American coin, and if you want to take a moment to really examine the coin, you’re likely to agree.
The US Mint was forced to make a few pragmatic compromises in minting the coin, however. The $20 Saint Gaudens wound up losing some detail, as the Mint could only feasibly produce low relief coins from Saint Gaudens’ intricate design. The problem had been that, to mint the coin in such a way as to preserve every last line of Saint Gaudens’ design, they were having to strike the coin eleven times, which was simply impractical and expensive, and would weaken the coin itself. Furthermore, the coins would not stack correctly, and would often tumble over when placed more than one or two high.
Luckily, the US Mint has changed all this in recent years. This year, in fact, the Mint began a program to produce ultra high relief examples of this exquisite coin. With new technology, the $20 Saint Gaudens coins being produced today are not only more intricate and more detailed than any that have been produced before, but even more detailed and beautiful than they would have been had the Mint been able to use a high relief minting process back when the coins were first being struck in 1907.
The coin was discontinued in 1933 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made it illegal to own the metal, although coin collectors were still allowed to hold whatever pieces they had retained. FDR also ended the coinage of gold, and so, the $20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle had ended.
A very, very few examples of 1933 Double Eagles are known to exist still. In 2002, a single specimen went for an incredible seven and a half million at an auction.
It’s certainly a good thing that the $20 Saint Gaudens were the ones used for the official US Mint investment grade coins. The work of Augustus Saint Gaudens was incredibly influential in western art, and the coin itself is one of the most beautiful and most historically important coins ever minted in the US. Without these investment coins, the piece may have been all but forgotten by everyone besides American history buffs.
Arthur McGuire
August 9, 2009
