Barber's head of Liberty is purely classical, and is rendered in the Roman style. The head is modeled after the French "Ceres" silver coinage of the late 19th century, but bears a resemblance to Morgan's design for the silver dollar. This did not escape numismatist Walter Breen in his comprehensive guide to U.S. coins: "Barber must have been feeling unusually lazy. He left the rev[erse design as it had been since 1860, with minor simplifications. His obvwas a mirror image of the Morgan dollar head, with much of Miss Anna Willess Williams's back hair cropped off, the rest concealed ... within a disproportionately large cap." In his text introducing the Barber quarter, Breen states, "the whole composition is Germanically stolid, prosy, crowded (especially on rev[erse), and without discernible merit aside from the technical one of low relief". Burdette terms Barber's designs, "typically mediocre imitations of the current French-style—hardly better than the arcane seated Liberty type they replaced".