1897 $5 Liberty Head Half Eagle NGC MS65

Here's a great fin de siècle $5 gold piece to add to your collection. NGC has graded 78 in MS65 with 17 finer.

Cornelius Vermeule sees the coroneted, white robed figure in the painting Pythagoras or The Earth is Round, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin as a model for Liberty heads on the U.S. gold Eagle coins. Photo: NGC.

Commenting upon the inspiration for Gobrecht's Liberty, numismatic scholar and art critic Cornelius Vermeule writes, "The motivation for this Roman head of Liberty stems from vast, varied neoclassicism of the Napoleonic era. Typical of the source is a small painting ... by Jacques-Louis David's contemporary 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."