Tom Phillips – coin designer

Coronation Jubilee Crown, obverse
silver
2003

In 2003 a commemorative coin was issued to mark the 50th anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It was designed by the artist Tom Phillips RA, who sadly died on 28 November 2022. Carrying an outline portrait of the Queen on the obverse, it was accompanied on the reverse by a celebratory arrangement of lettering reading God Save the Queen. While he had designed a medal for the British Art Medal Society some years earlier, he had never designed a coin before but this first outing drew on a playful use of language evident in many of his other works.

Tom Phillips was a portrait painter, musician, composer, curator, writer and, in the true sense of the word, a polymath. So to come to coin design relatively late in life was for him another episode in an already rich engagement with art and design. He is perhaps most famous for A Humument, a re-purposing of a long-forgotten Victorian novel which he painted over, creating new meanings from the text by highlighting and connecting words and phrases.

It would be a similar combination of words and images that provided the inspiration in 2005 for his design of the fifty pence piece to mark the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the original artwork for which is reproduced here. It was an ideal commission for him. The briefing process involved inviting the selected artists to visit Johnson’s house in Gough Square, London, where an original copy of the dictionary was on display. Phillips took the definition of ‘fifty’ and ‘pence’ and, a little like a page from A Humument, fitted them together to create a coin design that defined itself in celebration of a dictionary of meanings.

Tom Phillips went on to design three other United Kingdom coins, commemorative issues for the London 2012 Olympic Games and William Shakespeare, as well as a fifty pence piece on Benjamin Britten. He was one of the most innately talented artists of his generation and those interested in the British coinage are fortunate that he embraced it in his creative passage through our cultural life.

Kevin Clancy, Director of the Royal Mint Museum.