DALLAS, TX.- She strides ahead of General William Tecumseh Sherman at the southeastern entrance to Central Park, a winged figure whose movement helped inspire the Liberty that would grace America’s most celebrated gold coin. Behind that enduring image stands another story: Hettie Anderson, the Black model whose poise and physical discipline helped Augustus Saint-Gaudens give a national ideal human form.

On Nov. 13, Heritage Auctions will offer a rare gilded bronze reduction of Saint-Gaudens’s Victory as the centerpiece of its American Art Signature® Auction. The sculpture’s connections reach from the public monuments of Gilded Age New York to President Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign to transform American coinage — a particularly resonant story at Heritage, the leading auction house for numismatics.

“Victory brings together so much of what makes American art extraordinary: sculptural beauty, public ambition and a remarkable national story,” says Aviva Lehmann, Heritage’s Deputy Chairman of Fine Art. “From the Sherman monument in New York to Saint-Gaudens’s collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt on American coinage, Victory connects worlds that collectors often encounter separately. Yet its power is immediate. You feel her conviction and promise of that forward stride.”

Saint-Gaudens began the Sherman monument in 1892 and developed it over more than a decade before its unveiling in 1903 at Grand Army Plaza. Ahead of the mounted general, Victory advances with an outstretched arm, rising wings and flowing drapery. Her laurel crown and palm frond identify the classical allegory, but her momentum makes it immediate: a figure seemingly poised between walking and flight, leading toward the promise of peace.

Anderson posed for the sculptor in 1897. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, and living in New York by the mid-1890s, she became a valued model for artists including Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French. Her ability to sustain demanding poses was central to Victory’s creation. She also asserted control over her own image: After Saint-Gaudens gave her the first study for Victory’s head, a separate portrait bust, she registered a copyright in 1908 and declined the family’s request to reproduce it.

Roosevelt’s admiration for the Sherman monument helped lead him to enlist Saint-Gaudens in redesigning American coinage. Both men believed ancient Greek coins demonstrated that money could also be great art. The sculptor carried Victory’s animated drapery and commanding presence into his Liberty for the 1907 twenty-dollar gold piece, or Double Eagle. Equipped with a torch and olive branch, she brought the language of monumental sculpture into an object that could pass from hand to hand.

The design also tested the Mint’s capabilities. Its experimental Ultra High Relief and subsequent High Relief versions required repeated strikes, prompting a lower-relief adaptation for mass production. Saint-Gaudens’s Liberty endured on Double Eagles through 1933 and was adapted for the American Gold Eagle bullion series beginning in 1986. In 2009, the Mint returned to his original sculptural ambition with an Ultra High Relief Double Eagle made using modern technology.

The bronze offered by Heritage was cast between 1912 and the early 1920s, after the artist’s widow, Augusta, arranged for a reduced plaster model following his death in 1907. Other examples of the reduction entered collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art. Offered from a Connecticut estate, this Victory allows the figure to be appreciated independently of the monument, and the origins of a familiar image on American gold to be seen in three dimensions.

The tightly curated auction comprises just 80 lots, spanning the Hudson River School, the Gilded Age, American Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Regionalism and the Golden Age of Illustration.

“This 80-lot auction brings together wonderful paintings, sculpture and works on paper that reveal the extraordinary scope and narrative of American art,” Lehmann says. “Across generations and mediums, there is bold experimentation here, remarkable storytelling and exceptional craftsmanship—all part of a rich history.”

The auction also concludes Heritage’s two-year series of auctions from the BSA Settlement Trust’s collection, with works by Norman Rockwell and Joseph Csatari. This final offering gives collectors their last opportunity to acquire works directly from the Trust’s collection, with proceeds supporting compensation for survivors of childhood sexual abuse in Scouting.

Separate from that offering, two Rockwell studies from an Important Palm Beach Collector reveal the development of beloved Saturday Evening Post covers. Study for Saying Grace, created for the Nov. 24, 1951, Thanksgiving cover, depicts an older woman praying with two children; Rockwell omitted the girl from the finished composition and expanded the surrounding restaurant scene, deepening its themes of gratitude and tolerance.

Study for Shuffleton’s Barbershop carries an especially personal history. Rockwell gave it to Robert Shuffleton, owner of the East Arlington, Vermont, shop, inscribing his best wishes to “my friend.” Shuffleton also appears as the cellist among the musicians gathered in the warmly illuminated back room. Painted in oil over photographic paper, the study shows Rockwell resolving the color and light of the composition that became the April 29, 1950 Post, cover.

From the same Palm Beach collection comes J.C. Leyendecker’s Hailing You for the U.S. Navy, the original 1918 oil behind his World War I recruiting image. A sailor raises his hand before a billowing American flag, while a monkey, a parrot, tropical provisions and crashing waves suggest adventures beyond the horizon. The painting demonstrates how Leyendecker brought the persuasive power of commercial illustration to a national wartime campaign.

Three works by Ernie Barnes include Fight and Bite, acquired directly from the artist by former New Orleans Saints owner John W. Mecom, Jr. Its interlocked wrestlers translate Barnes’s firsthand understanding of athletic exertion into sweeping limbs, compressed poses and vivid color.

Jacob Lawrence’s Spring Plowing, painted in 1942 following his Migration Series, turns to rural Southern labor, setting a farmer and his animals against broad, rhythmic furrows.

Milton Avery’s Blonde Nude, 1960, offers the artist’s indelible expression of modernism through pale pink flesh, golden hair and striking yellow drapery. Its simplified forms and expressive color connect Avery’s Matisse-like sensibility with the late work that helped establish his importance to painters such as Mark Rothko and the development of Color Field painting. Paintings by Dale Nichols, illustration by Maurice Sendak and bronzes by Alexander Phimister Proctor further enrich this select survey of American art.