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

By Doug Briscoe

It’s another big day for writers: Oscar Wilde, Eugene O’Neill, and Günter Grass were all born on the 16th. But painters make a brave show, as well: it’s Arnold Böcklin’s birthday, and Lucas Cranach the Elder died 464 years ago today. Music is represented by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, who died on this day in 1621.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (c1472 – 16 October 1553) had a large workshop that churned out great numbers of paintings, and many of these have found their way onto postage stamps of the world. Keep in mind that many of these works exist in multiple versions. To begin, as it were, at the end, we have a Self-Portrait made late in the artist’s life, aged 77 (1550; some scholars attribute this work to Cranach’s son Lucas the Younger). I don’t know the source of the portrait on the stamp with the green background, also from the DDR, but the West German stamp shows a portrait drawn by Albrecht Dürer (1524). Next to this is a portrait of Katharina von Bora, the wife of Cranach’s dear friend Martin Luther (1526). The second row, consisting of mythological pieces, begins with Venus with Cupid as Honey Thief (1537) and continues with Reclining Nymph of the Spring (1518) and Venus Standing in a Landscape (1529). Turning to religious imagery, we see the Madonna now in Innsbruck Cathedral (after 1537), a Rwandan Easter souvenir sheet of the Pietà, and Samson’s Fight with the Lion (1525). In the fourth and final row we concentrate on portraits: Lady with Fern, Portrait of a Saxon Prince (possibly Johann, husband of Elizabeth of Hesse; c1517), Portrait of Margaretha Luther (Luther’s Mother), and Portrait of the Wife of Dr Johann Stephan Reuss (1503).

The writings of Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) served as the inspiration for an astonishing number of musical works. Besides the most famous example, Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, that same story was the basis for a half-hour long tone poem by the American composer Henry Hadley, who also wrote cantatas on Wilde’s tales “The Golden Prince” and “The Nightingale and the Rose”. The last named story has inspired six (six!) operas and four ballets, one of them a 2007 composition by Bright Sheng. Not to be outdone, “The Birthday of the Infanta” has been the source of eight (!) ballets by, among others, Franz Schreker (1908), John Alden Carpenter (1919), Elisabeth Lutyens (1932), and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1942); it is also the source for one of two (!) Wilde-based operas by Zemlinsky, Der Zwerg; the other one is Eine florentinische Tragödie, the inspiration for which, the story “A Florentine Tragedy”, also served as the springboard for Prokofiev’s early opera Maddalena. There are three operas on “The Canterville Ghost”. Lowell Liebermann wrote one on “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in 1996. Others include “The Happy Prince” by Malcolm Williamson (c1965) and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” by Geoffrey Bush (1972), and there’s a ballet by Jacques Ibert on “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1922). Wilde’s poems have been set many times. “Requiescat” alone (“Tread lightly, she is near”) gave us songs by George Butterworth, Luigi Dallapiccola, Otto Luening, Ned Rorem, and Erwin Schulhoff, among others. Granville Bantock wrote a song cycle on “The Sphinx”, and Frederic Rzewski set excerpts from Wilde’s late prose work “De Profundis”. Not to mention film scores by Alexandre Tansman (Flesh and Fantasy, 1943), Arthur Benjamin (An Ideal Husband, 1947), and Benjamin Frankel (the incomparable Anthony Asquith version of The Importance of Being Earnest with Michael Redgrave, Joan Greenwood, and the inimitable Edith Evans [“A ha-a-a-ndba-ag?!”] from 1952). For a full list, if you’re not thoroughly exhausted yet, see the Wikipedia article “Music based on the works of Oscar Wilde”.

Frankly, in that regard, Eugene O’Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) can’t compete. But he holds his own in other respects, having won the Nobel Prize in 1936 and whatnot. It is a bit surprising, though, that the United States seems to be alone in having given O’Neill a stamp—on the other hand, it has a denomination of $1, back in 1973 when the cost of mailing a letter was eight cents.

German writer Günter Grass (16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was also a Nobel Laureate, having been awarded his prize in 1999. Drafted into the Waffen-SS in 1944 (a fact he suppressed until 2006), he was wounded, captured, and interned in the final days of the war. After his release he studied and worked in graphic design and sculpture. His first published works were poems and plays. His first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), made into a film by Volker Schlöndorff twenty years later, is still likely his best known despite its having been followed by many other volumes. Grass’s eulogy was delivered by John Irving.

The Italian painter Luca Signorelli (c.?1450—16 October 1523) was born Luca d’Egidio di Ventura in Cortona. It’s interesting, I think, to note that one of his uncles was the great-grandfather of Giorgio Vasari. On that gentleman’s testimony, Luca was apprenticed to Piero della Francesca. In Signorelli’s masterpiece, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist in Orvieto Cathedral (c1501), he portrayed himself standing next to Piero. It is this self-portrait that serves as the basis of the old Italian stamp of 1953.

Born nearly a century after Signorelli’s death, Flemish landscape painter Jan Wildens (1586 – 16 October 1653), who was born and died in Antwerp, is represented on a stamp of Ajman with his Winter Landscape with Hunter (1624). Again there is a family connection to another well known artist: in this case, the second husband of Wildens’s mother had a daughter who married the portrait painter Cornelis de Vos. He was a personal friend of Rubens and frequently collaborated with him as well as with other Antwerp painters. Wildens was very successful as both a painter and a gallery owner.

 

We move from Italian and Flemish painters to a French one who was, however, better known as a sculptor and also functioned as an architect and engineer. This was Pierre Puget (16 October 1620 – 2 December 1694). When he was only 14 he was carving decorations onto the ships in the harbor at his native Marseilles, and at 16 he was not only put in charge of the ornaments for a entire ship but for its very construction! He went twice to Italy—the first time on foot—to improve and apply his craft. One of his busiest periods as a painter succeeded that second Italian trip, with many pictures being executed in France. He gave up painting completely after 1665. A productive period in Genoa was followed by a return to France, on the orders of Colbert, no less, but he spent more time in Marseille than in Paris. The critic Théophile Gautier regarded Puget as the greatest sculptor of his day. Southeast of Marseilles lies a mountain range, one of the peaks of which has been named Mont Puget in honor of the artist. The French stamp shows an adaptation of Puget’s Self-Portrait (1668-9) along with examples of his art. Foremost is his Milo of Croton (1682). (The story here—I had to look it up—is of a 6th-century BC Greek wrestler who was said to have been attacked by wolves. Somehow by the 17th century the wolves had metamorphosed into a lion.) Also seen are a ship with the kind of figurehead Puget might have carved and the telamones (male caryatids) that are now found at the City Hall of Toulon. Omitted from the stamp is perhaps Puget’s best known work, Perseus and Andromeda (1715), commissioned by Louis XIV for Versailles. Another fine piece is his Saint Sebastian (1663-68), and I thought I’d link to another example of Puget’s painting, The Visitation (1659).

On this date in 1621, Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck died. He was born in April or May of 1562 in Deventer. His organist father, Peter Swybbertszoon, took the family to Amsterdam shortly after Sweelinck’s birth, but died in 1573. We know little about how Jan furthered his musical education thereafter, but he became organist at the Oude Kerk about four years later, at the age of 15, and held the position for 44 years. For some reason, he took the name of his mother, Elske Jansdochter Sweeling, for the title page of his first published works. His reputation as a teacher of organ playing was such that he was known in Germany as the “maker of organists”. (Because so many of his students were Germans, he is seen as a seminal influence in the North German organ school.) He is credited with the invention, more or less, of the fugue. He also composed 250 vocal works, both sacred and secular.

The French poet, critic, and translator François de Malherbe (1555 – October 16, 1628) was very well educated at Caen, Paris, Heidelberg, and Basel. Little of distinction is recorded in his youth. In 1600 he presented a welcome ode to Maria de’ Medici and subsequently was active at the court of Henry IV. It seems his own poetical works were less valuable in and of themselves than they were in their pervasive influence on subsequent generations. He left a large body of prose and translated Livy and Seneca.

 

Born in Danzig (Gdańsk) to a Polish father and Swiss Huguenot mother, the painter and printmaker Daniel Chodowiecki (kho-do-V’YET-ski; 16 October 1726 – 7 February 1801) lived in Berlin from the age of 16. There he and his brother were trained as painters. A student of the Berlin Academy, he became the institution’s vice-director a quarter-century later, then director in 1797. Though he lived most of his life in Berlin and had forgotten most of his Polish, he always took pride in that side of his heritage. After thirty years away from home, he visited his mother and wrote and copiously illustrated a book about the trip, The Journey from Berlin to Danzig (1773). Besides his paintings he left thousands of etchings and many book illustrations, especially for scientific works. His image appeared on the high-inflation 1,000,000 mark banknote of Danzig from 1923. The stamp shows his illustration wryly entitled “Education“—the tutor appears to be “educating” the young lady rather than his bored and idle young charge.

 

We note also the birthday of Count Josip Jelačić (YELL-a-tchitch) of Bužim (1801 – 20 May 1859), a military commander memorialized by the Jelačić March, Op. 244, composed by Johann Strauss the Elder in 1849. It is the march, rather than the Count, that is the subject of the stamp of 1999. While Jelačić himself is much admired in Croatia, where he is held to be a national hero (he abolished serfdom there), in Austria “he was looked upon as a rebel seeking to break up the Austrian Empire” (Wikipedia), and in Hungary he is viewed with strong disfavor “as a traitor to the Hungarian Revolution during the struggle for independence from the Austrian throne.” In an oft-quoted poem by Sándor Petőfi, he is called “Jelačić the coward”, who “runs back to Vienna with his army beaten”. So the stamp comes from—good guess—Croatia. As for the music, the liner notes with the Marco Polo edition of Strauss Sr’s complete dances and marches tell us that it “uses a Croatian song in the trio and at the end even eight bars of a kolo, the national dance of Croatia.” The march, found in Volume 25 of the CD series, may be the last composition Strauss ever finished.

16 October is the birthday of the fine Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 16 January 1901), whose painting The Isle of the Dead (which exists, actually, in five versions, this one being the third of 1883) inspired Rachmaninov’s tone poem of the same name. Another painting, The Homecoming (1887), was on Rachmaninov’s mind during the composition of his Prelude in b minor, Op. 32, No. 10. Plus there’s a four-movement orchestral suite by Reger based on four Böcklin paintings (one of them The Isle of the Dead). Born in Basel, Böcklin studied in Düsseldorf, where he became a friend of Anselm Feuerbach, and lived at various times in Rome, Munich, Zurich, and Florence. I found four philatelic Böcklin items. The 2001 Swiss stamp, issued for the centenary of the artist’s death, reproduces his Birth of Venus (1869). Calm Sea (1887) appears on a stamp of Benin, as well as on the Somalia sheetlet. Sierra Leone gives us a stamp of Moonlit Landscape with Ruins (1849). The other three pieces on the Somalia sheet (barely discernable here) are Idyll (or Lovers, 1866), Playing in the Waves (1883), and Mermaids at Play.

A word now about the brilliant British railway and civil engineer Robert Stephenson (16 October 1803 – 12 October 1859), whose most famous creation may be the prototypical steam locomotive “Stephenson’s Rocket”, designed in 1829. This device is found on a number of stamps. I show the ones from the UK, Laos, and Hungary. Another philatelic homage is found on a recent British issue showing Stephenson’s Royal Border Bridge, a viaduct erected between 1847 and 1850. Some view Stephenson as the greatest engineer of the 19th century.

 

Italian painter Ippolito Caffi (16 October 1809 – 20 July 1866) was born in Belluno, well to the north of Venice. He moved to Rome in 1832, but his work often took him to other cities. In 1843 he traveled to Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Malta. He took part in revolutionary movements against Austria in 1848 and was captured, but escaped and spent the next several years in Genoa, Turin, Switzerland, and Spain. On his return to Rome he reopened his studio, but when he moved to Venice in 1858 he was apprehended again and spent three months in prison for his revolutionary activities. In 1866 he accompanied a fighting ship in hopes of painting naval battle scenes, but the war came a bit too close when his ship was sunk with all hands. The stamps show a couple of his Venetian scenes, and I link to some further examples of his work: Venice: The Molo at Sunset (1864), The Tiber and Castel Sant’Angelo, and View of the Pantheon, Rome.

American photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) is credited along with Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston with legitimizing photography as a serious art form. Born in New York City, he studied with Lewis Hine and branched out into film with a 10-minute silent documentary, Manhattan, in 1921. In 1933 he was invited by composer Carlos Chávez to come to Mexico to make a film about the fishing community of Alvarado. This became Redes, released in 1936, with music by Silvestre Revueltas. Strand also did some of the cinematography on The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), another film with music by a prominent composer, Virgil Thomson. He settled in France in 1949 and concentrated again on still photography. Some of his early work is described as “cubist, nearly abstract”, but in this later work he returned to basics for a series of books of geographical “portraits”. The first of these was Time in New England (1950), from which one of the photos, Steeple (1946), was selected for the stamp.

The best known work for the stage by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály (KO-dye) is his opera Háry János (HAH-ree YAH-nosh). It had its first performance 91 years ago today in Budapest. As you may know, in Hungarian usage the family name comes first, and this order is usually reversed by foreigners. Thus we non-Hungarians say “Zoltán Kodály” rather than “Kodály Zoltán” as the natives do. But this opera’s title has always been an exception—normally in English we would say János [or John] Háry. The opera is referenced in the background of this 1953 airmail stamp from a set honoring six Hungarian composers.

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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.