1839/8 $10 Liberty Head Eagle, Type of 1838 PCGS AU55

This is a rare variety that has a quite dramatic look to it. PCGS has graded only 11 of the 1839/8 $10 Eagle, Type of 1838, as AU55 with just 26 finer.

Gold specialist David Akers writes that there “are different types with the head of Liberty dramatically different on each issue.…I have opted to call this first 1839 issue the "Type of '38" and the second 1839 issue, the "Type of '40"….The 1839 Type of '38 is rare in all grades…” Please see photo below displaying the different types, as well as a photo of details of the rare 1839/8 overdate.

1839 $10 Eagle Type Comparison, courtesy of PCGS Coinfacts website.

According to Walter Breen’s Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins (1988), the Eagle gold $10 coin was halted via verbal orders of President Jefferson in December of 1804. Writes Breen, “in July 1838 … the Secretary of [the] Treasury instructed Mint Director Robert Patterson to resume coinage of this denomination … Acting Engraver Christian Gobrecht prepared new dies …“ According to Breen, “Gobrecht copied the head of Venus in Benjamin West’s recent painting Omnia Vincit Amor, (Love Conquers All) …”

However, numismatic scholar and art critic Cornelius Vermeule sees a different source for Gobrecht’s inspiration: "a small painting ... by … Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Pythagoras or The Earth is Round, painted about 1800 .... [On the painting it] is the diademed or coroneted, white-robed, seated female that should attract our attention, for she is related to the heads of Liberty on our 19th century gold ... coinage."

Liberty head $10, 1839/8 Type of 1838, close-up image of the 1839/8 overdate. Courtesy of PCGS Coinfacts website.