Frederick William MacMonnies (September 28, 1863 – March 22, 1937) was the best known expatriate American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts school, as successful and lauded in France as he was in the United States.

In 1880 MacMonnies began an apprenticeship under Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and was soon promoted to studio assistant, beginning his lifelong friendship with the acclaimed sculptor.

In 1884 MacMonnies traveled to Paris to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, twice winning the highest award given to foreign students.

Copies are scattered in museums across the United States, since MacMonnies was one of the earliest American sculptors to supplement his fees from major commissions by selling reduced-size reproductions to the public.

In 1888, the intervention of Stanford White gained MacMonnies two major commissions for garden sculpture for influential Americans, a decorative Pan fountain sculpture for Rohallion, the New Jersey mansion of banker Edward Adams, who opened for him a social circle of art-appreciating New Yorkers, and a work for ambassador Joseph H. Choate, at Naumkeag, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

In 1889 an Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon for his Diana led to further and more public American commissions, including spandrel reliefs for Stanford White's permanent Washington Arch, New York, and the Nathan Hale memorial in City Hall Park, dedicated in 1893.

In 1894, Stanford White brought another prestigious and highly visible commission, for three bronze groups for the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza.

(Bogart, p. 35) Around the turn of the century, MacMonnies was commissioned to design the equestrian statue of Henry Warner Slocum in Brooklyn, which was dedicated in 1905.

Due to fame gathered from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, he was commissioned to produce a large public sculpture celebrating the pioneers of the American Old West, his only work on this subject.

In late 1917, MacMonnies was commissioned by a group of influential citizens of New York City, to work on a sculpture in honor of those who died in the First Battle of the Marne, as a gift to the French people in exchange for the Statue of Liberty.

[7] Called, in French, La Liberté éplorée ("The Tearful Liberty") the statue, located in Meaux, France, is over seven stories tall, at 22 metres (72 ft).

[10] Selected to sculpt the fourth issue of the long running Society of Medalists in 1931, MacMonnies chose to celebrate Charles Lindbergh's solo Trans-Atlantic flight of 1927.

The powerful bust of Lindbergh on the obverse, combined with the reverse's dramatic allegorical depiction of a lone eagle battling across the sea, mark this issue as one of the more popular of the series.