Notable depictions of the Great Seal of the United States
This article provides a list of notable depictions of the Great Seal of the United States, excluding the official dies.
More significantly, the arrows and the olive branch are switched, indicating an intentional "difference" to distinguish it from the actual Great Seal.
[3][4] St. Paul's Chapel in New York City has a large oil painting of the national coat of arms, believed installed sometime in 1786.
The painting has many similarities to Trenchard's version (or vice versa depending on which came first), including the random placement of stars and details of the eagle.
[4][5] European powers had traditionally given "peace medals" to Native American Indians in an attempt to curry favor, and the newly created United States followed suit.
On April 28, 1786, the Congress authorized creation of Indian Peace Medals with the coat of arms (obverse of the Great Seal) on one side, and various designs on the other.
The stars are randomly placed, the clouds form an arc, with the rays of the glory upward and outwards, a design reminiscent of the modern-day seal of the president of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson (then the Secretary of State) instructed the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Paris (William Short) to contract with a local engraver to make the medals, since the first was to go to the Marquis de la Luzerne, the former French minister.
For the reverse, Dupré apparently followed one of Jefferson's suggestions, depicting a scene of international commerce portrayed as Mercury (the god of diplomacy) in conference with the genius of America (shown as an Indian chief, similar to some early American copper coins).
Their existence was eventually forgotten until the 1870s, when references to the medals in Jefferson's papers were connected to the discovery of Dupré's lead working model.
Among them was a basic design for any gold or silver coins; the obverse was required to have an "impression emblematic of liberty", with the reverse having a "figure or representation of an eagle".
According to Henry A. Wallace (then the Secretary of Agriculture in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet), in 1934 he saw a 1909 pamphlet on the Great Seal by Gaillard Hunt.
The carpet was 22 by 40 feet, and was made by William Peter Sprague, an Englishman from Axminster (probably trained under Thomas Whitty) who had set up a factory in Philadelphia.
The National Park Service had a reproduction made in 1978 as part of the restoration of Congress Hall; they had to speculate on the exact design of the eagle and chose the representation seen on the first seal die.
[11] In the July 1856 Harper's New Monthly Magazine, historian Benson John Lossing wrote an article on the Great Seal.
[3] In February 1882, C. A. L. Totten (then a 1st lieutenant in the U.S. Army) wrote to both the Secretaries of State and Treasury to suggest some sort of commemoration for the Great Seal, which was to have its centennial later that year, in particular including a version of the never-cut and rarely seen reverse side.
For the obverse, Barber primarily used Trenchard's 1786 Columbian Magazine version, but replaced the eagle with the superior one from Dupré's 1792 Diplomatic Medal (which had been rediscovered a few years before).
[3][6] On August 4, 1945, a delegation from the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union presented a carved wooden plaque of the Great Seal to U.S.
