The Arts on Stamps of the World —October 4

An Arts Fuse regular feature: the arts on stamps of the world.

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By Doug Briscoe

Three famous painters, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Jean-François Millet, and Frederic Remington are the main course today, with three more 17th- and 18th-century Italian artists as a side dish, and Buster Keaton for dessert. Naturally, all the courses are birthday cake.

Lucas Cranach the Younger (4 October 1515 – 25 January 1586) is less renowned than his father, whose birthday is twelve days from now, but better known than his brother Hans or his son Augustin. He was born in Wittenberg and served as an apprentice in his father’s workshop. When his father died, it was Lucas, not elder brother Hans, who took charge of the studio. The Rwandan stamp shows Portrait of a Woman, but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the work of the father and the son, and it appears that the designer for the two stamps from Djibouti may have misattributed both the pieces represented. Each of the pictures in any case exists in several versions. The first item, Lucretia, which purports to be by Cranach the Younger, is explicitly assigned to his father on Wikipedia and on 1000museums.com, while this variant and this one are attributed, the first doubtfully, to the son and dated c1540. Meanwhile this other version of 1537, again according to Wikipedia, could be by either or both. Similarly, the offered version of The Judgment of Paris appears to be by Dad (c1512-14), with this variant (c1540-45) being Junior’s work. I wash my hands of the whole mess.

Now to the first of our three (consecutive) Italian artists, Francesco Solimena (October 4, 1657 – April 3, 1747), who learned from and collaborated with his father, Angelo Solimena, before going off on his own on a highly productive and remunerative career. He spent most of his life in Nocera and Naples, where his patron was Cardinal Vincenzo Orsini (later Pope Benedict XIII). Solimena developed into the dominant Neapolitan painter for the last fifty years of his life, executing frescoes, altarpieces, mythological paintings, and portraits. An example of his typically busy painted scenes can be observed in his Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple. He had many pupils, the Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay spending three years in Solimena’s studio. Solimena got rich and was made a baron. On the 1991 Polish Christmas stamp is an Adoration of the Shepherds from Solimena’s hand. Here, for the curious, is a self-portrait of the artist.

The Venetian Francesco Fontebasso (4 October 1707 – 31 May 1769) apprenticed with Sebastiano Ricci, but was perhaps more indebted to Tiepolo for his own style. He went to Saint Petersburg in 1761 and provided decorations for the Winter Palace, remaining for seven years before returning to Venice, where he died the next year. Coincidentally, the only Fontebasso stamp we have is, as with Solimena, an Adoration of the Shepherds, this time from an Hungarian stamp of 1970.

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The best known of our three Italian artists is Giovanni Battista Piranesi (4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778) known mostly for his etchings of Rome and the vast, dark fantasy interiors of his collection Le Carceri d’Invenzione, which in later eras would have an influence on both Romanticism and Surrealism. Marguerite Yourcenar wrote an analysis of these pieces called “The Dark Brain of Piranesi” (1984). The writer of the Wikipedia article on Piranesi aptly describes them as “capricci, whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin.” They make me think of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Piranesi was born to a stonemason near Treviso and apprenticed to his uncle, an important architect. At the age of 20 he went to Rome to learn etching and engraving. He and other pupils of the French Academy made a series of views of the city, and in 1764 Piranesi was commissioned to document significant structures in drawings that in many cases have survived their subjects. Piranesi’s only work in stone seems to have been on the reconstructed facade of the church of Santa Maria del Priorato in the Villa of the Knights of Malta on Rome’s Aventine Hill. This leads us to something of a philatelic curiosity: the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is an entity that has diplomatic relations with 106 countries along with permanent observer status at the UN. It has also issued its own postage stamps since 1966, though these do not have universal postal validity. One set from 1985 is devoted to Piranesi’s illustrations, including some for the design of the aforesaid church and one self-portrait. Piranesi is also one of the numerous artists remembered in a series of Italian stamps showing their images—his is derived from an etched portrait by his friend Felice Polanzani. Piranesi’s own work, one of his Roman drawings, is seen on a recent Czech stamp of 2013.

The most famous painting by Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875) is surely The Gleaners (1857), which can be found on a stamp from Burundi. The other three stamps, from France, Jordan, and the Republic of Guinea, show The Winnower (1848) , The Angelus (1857-59), and Hayricks, Autumn (1873). Born in Normandy, Millet studied with a portrait painter in Cherbourg before attending the École des Beaux-Arts with Paul Delaroche. Millet later became one of the founders of the Barbizon school.

Despite his association with the American West, Frederic Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an easterner, born in northern New York state. His cousins included Western artists Charles M. Russell and George Catlin. Remington loved making drawings, particularly of soldiers and cowboys, from childhood. He studied art at Yale but was more inclined to more physical sorts of activity. He went west at 19 without plans to make a living as an artist; but Harper’s Weekly did publish a sketch he sent back, the first time Remington had been paid for his talent. After various disappointments in employment, business, and marriage, he turned at last to painting as a means of income. He returned to New York, the city, this time, undertook further studies, and began selling to magazines. Again, it was Harper’s that gave him his first cover when he was 25. They also sent him west on a number of assignments. He had a one-man show in 1890 and exaggerated his western bona fides (and accent). In 1898 the United States Postal Service selected two of Remington’s works for its Trans-Mississippi Exposition issue of nine stamps, which they called Troops Guarding Train and Western Mining Prospector. These, I believe, were derived from black-and-white illustrations, not paintings. They are among the earliest stamps we’ve seen in this feature. Remington himself was honored on a stamp of 1940, and further issues reproduced his art: from 1961, The Smoke Signal (1905), also seen on a Nicaraguan stamp in honor of the US bicentennial; from 1981, Coming Through the Rye (1902-03; Remington had turned to sculpture just a few years earlier) and, from 2001, a detail from A Dash for the Timber (1889). I also found a Remington on a stamp from the United Arab Emirate of Sharjah. The original Trans-Mississippi Exposition stamps, by the way, are fairly pricey, but in 1998, the USPS reissued the whole set for those who are content with replicas. Remington grew very obese as time wore on; that fact complicated his appendectomy at age 58, and he died of peritonitis.

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We have three well-known actors on stamps today, the earliest being Joseph Frank Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966), known to posterity as Buster Keaton. His family was in vaudeville in Kansas, and Buster joined right in from infancy, his first stage appearance taking place in Wilmington, Delaware when he was four. At 21 he moved smoothly into film. After serving in France with the 40th Infantry during World War I, he had his first starring role in 1920’s The Saphead. His brilliant physical comedy was heightened by his perpetually blank expression, earning him the nickname “The Great Stone Face”. Orson Welles was of the opinion that The General (1926) was not only the finest comedy in cinema, but possibly even the greatest film ever made. Keaton was honored on a stamp in a US set of Al Hirschfeld caricatures of silent screen stars and also on a Canadian stamp referencing The Railrodder, a 1965 short in which Keaton traversed the breadth of Canada on a motorized handcar, reprising the kinds of gags he had conceived fifty years earlier. It was one of his last film appearances, the last being A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966).

Estonian writer August Mälk (4 October 1900 – 19 December 1987) was born in what was then the Russian Empire and attended the University of Tartu, after which he became a teacher and school headmaster. His first novel, Kesaliblik, appeared in 1926. His eighth, Õitsev Meri (The Flowering Sea, 1935), the first volume of a trilogy, brought him great success. He entered politics in 1937 and served in the government until the Soviets invaded Estonia in 1940. He fled to Sweden and died in Stockholm nearly half a century later. Mälk also wrote stories, plays, and two volumes of memoirs.

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The Turkish poet Cahit Sitki Taranci (born Hüseyin Cahit; October 4, 1910 – October 13, 1956) came from a family deeply involved in the Armenian Genocide, his father and his uncle both having organized killings of Armenians in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir. This would have been when Taranci was five years old, and I do not know whether he referred to the matter, in his poetry or otherwise, in later life. He studied in Istanbul in the early 1930s, then in Paris, returning to Turkey when the war came along. His first volume of poetry, Ömrümde sükut (Silence of My Life), had come out in 1933. It’s a suggesive title, but again I am ignorant of the book’s content. He suffered paralysis in 1954 and died in a hospital in Vienna two years later.

We have another centenary to celebrate today. The Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (4 October 1917 – 5 February 1967) came from a large family of creative people mostly active in folk music, though others, like Violeta herself, also worked in the visual arts. She performed from her youth and in 1952 began her work as an ethnomusicologist, collecting Chilean folk music. Her own compositions reflected these traditional forms. Before long she was being asked to teach courses on the subject. She also introduced the music to listeners on radio. On her return from the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955, Parra recorded the first album in a series for EMI called “The folklore of Chile” and published two books, Cantos Folklóricos Chilean and a volume of memoirs (in verse!) bearing the title Décimas autobiográficas. After that she began working in ceramics, embroidery, and painting, becoming so accomplished that she presented the first of a number of exhibits of her oils and wire sculptures, one of them at the Louvre—the first solo exhibition of works by a Latin American artist to be held at the museum. Parra committed suicide at the age of 49. Her friend Pablo Neruda dedicated poem to her three years later. A film about her, Violeta Went to Heaven (Violeta se fue a los cielos). was made by Andrés Wood in 2011. Violeta Parra’s most famous song, “Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks to Life”), was made popular in Latin America by Mercedes Sosa and in the US by Joan Baez. It was also recorded by Plácido Domingo.

We end up today with two more film actors, Charlton Heston (October 4, 1923 – April 5, 2008) from Illinois and Christoph Waltz (born 4 October 1956) from Vienna. Heston got his Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), Waltz for Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012).


A graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in English, Doug Briscoe worked in Boston classical music radio, at WCRB, WGBH, and WBUR, for about 25 years, beginning in 1977. He has the curious distinction of having succeeded Robert J. Lurtsema twice, first as host of WGBH’s weekday morning classical music program in 1993, then as host of the weekend program when Robert J.’s health failed in 2000. Doug also wrote liner notes for several of the late Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings releases as well as program notes for the Boston Classical Orchestra. For the past few years he’s been posting a Facebook “blog” of classical music on stamps of the world, which has now been expanded to encompass all the arts for The Arts Fuse.

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