1922-S $20 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle, PCGS MS64+ (CAC) "Registry Set Piece"

It is with pride that we at AUCM present for consideration a dramatic Registry Set Piece: 1922-S $20 Saint-Gaudens, graded PCGS MS64+ (CAC). David Akers writes, "The 1922-S is nearly always very sharply struck. The surfaces are frosty and usually have well above average lustre for the series. The color, particularly on most top grade specimens, is characteristically excellent, usually a rich greenish gold with orange highlights or a deep yellow gold with a coppery tint. Many specimens have noticeable reddish or orange copper spots. Some specimens have a noticeable inner 'rim' (die bulge) just inside the normal rim that runs through the stars and tops of the reverse letters and across the sun. Rounded, almost beveled, rims are seen on many examples of this issue."

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."