1913-S $20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle PCGS MS64 (CAC)

1913-S $20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle PCGS MS64 (CAC) - A Conditional Rarity

     We at AUCM offer to the numismatic community with pride a beautiful example of a rare 1913-S $20 Saint-Gaudens graded PCGS MS64 (CAC). In its assigned grade, it is a difficult piece to find. Jeff Garrett writes, "This date is very popular as the third lowest mintage Double Eagle after the 1907 High Relief and the 1908-S. ... For some reason, a significant number were saved; there probably sat out the first half of the [twentieth] century in European or South American bank vaults. The 1913-S is a classic conditional rarity."

     Numismatic scholar and art critic Cornelius Vermeule writes, "The double eagle is perhaps the most majestic coin ever to bear our national imprint. The Liberty striding forward is as grand in miniature as the Hellenistic Victory of Samothrace on a heroic scale. The eagle in flight against the sun on the reverse achieves complete domination of motion and expanding vista over the confines of a tiny tondo. Although the authorities at the Mint flattened the relief to facilitate striking and handling, this coin has remained a forceful demonstration that modern, mechanical coinage need in no way be pedestrian." Discussing both Saint-Gaudens' $10 eagle along with his $20 double eagle, Vermeule writes, "Both coins seems as modern a century after they were conceived as any issues, American or otherwise, produced in the past generation, and compared with what has been tolerated heretofore in the United States, both burst as artistic skyrockets in the horizons of our academic creativity."