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

By Doug Briscoe

The fount of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was born in Boston and attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College, later teaching at his brother’s school in Chelmsford. In the space of a very short time he lost two promising brothers and his young wife to tuberculosis. The son of a Unitarian minister and himself ordained, he began to question his faith and church hierarchy. He made a Grand Tour of Europe in 1833, meeting John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. It was three years later that he began the Transcendental Club. The next year he became close with Thoreau (who, by the way, was just two days ago honored on a new American stamp—we’ll see it on his birthday in July, but if you’re too impatient, you can sneak a peek at it here or at your local P.O.). In 1841, Emerson’s second book, Essays, including the landmark “Self-Reliance”, was published, the beginning of his international reputation. As a lecturer he was in great demand. Despite his enormous influence—which, admittedly, did significantly wane in the mid-20th century—he is seen on but a single stamp from 1940. A couple of other tidbits: he was godfather to William James, and the splendid Emerson String Quartet is named for him. Emerson roundly condemned the Fugitive Slave Act and, in language that resonates strongly today, wrote, “This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century by people who could read and write. I will not obey it.” Substitute “twenty-first” for “nineteenth,” print it on a T-shirt, and wear it.

Belle Miriam Silverman (25 May 1929 – July 2, 2007) was born in Brooklyn, the daughter of Ukrainian and Romanian Jewish immigrants, and she grew up speaking English, Yiddish, Russian, and Romanian, as well as French! At the age of four, she was already performing on the radio as “Bubbles”, a nickname she would retain throughout her life. By the time she was eight, she had already adopted her stage name of Beverly Sills. Her professional debut was in Gilbert and Sullivan when she was 16, and her first operatic performance was as Frasquita in Bizet’s Carmen in Philadelphia in 1947. In 1960, Sills relocated to Milton, Massachusetts and began a collaboration with Sarah Caldwell. She achieved stardom with her appearances in a 1966 New York City Opera revival of Handel’s Julius Caesar and was on the cover of Time magazine in 1971. With her official debut at the Met—in Rossini’s Siege of Corinth in 1975—she received an 18-minute ovation. She made many television appearances on talk shows and even had her own TV program in the early 70s. On her retirement from the stage in 1980 she became general director of the New York City Opera and was later chairman of the Metropolitan Opera.

The day before yesterday we marked the anniversary of the passing of 17th-century French painter Louis Le Nain. His brother Antoine (c1588 – 25 May 1648) followed him in death just two days later, 369 years ago today. This leads me to assume they must have expired of a shared disease, but I haven’t been able—as the M.E. would say—to determine the cause of death. Also, as I mentioned on Monday, it’s often difficult to tell the brothers’ work apart, especially given that they collaborated on many of their canvases. The stamp from Monaco attributes Farmer’s Meal Time (1642) to Antoine, but elsewhere online I find it assigned to Louis. Take your pick.

Serbian painter Konstantin Danil, born in 1798 with the family name Grigorović, died on this date in 1873. A single drawing got him into an art school when he was just 13. After further study in Vienna and Munich he returned to Timișoara and Novi Sad. His work caught the eye of an Hungarian nobleman whose patronage (and whose niece, whom Danil married) solidified the painter’s position. He created hundreds of portraits, one of which, Pavle Jagodić, graces a Yugoslav stamp of 1971, while the next year saw the issuance of Danil’s Still Life with Melon.

Swiss historiographer Jacob Burckhardt (May 25, 1818 – August 8, 1897) made a mark as essentially the creator of his field, art and culture in the context of history, as well as one of its foremost thinkers. His particular concentration is reflected in his two most prominent and influential books, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and The History of the Renaissance in Italy (1867). The Swiss stamp derives from the year 1947.

Eugène Grasset (25 May 1845 – 23 October 1917) was an important decorative artist who is seen as one of the progenitors of Art Nouveau and who worked in posters, postcards, etc., an internationalist who admired and was influenced by the art of Egypt and Japan and whose work found a large audience in the United States. A typeface based on his posters is named for him. But none of this side of his creative work is reflected on stamps; rather Grasset designed a considerable number of stamps himself, and I exhibit a few examples. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland and active mostly in France, his designs were for the postage stamps of both countries. The one at right dates from 1904. It is one of the first stamps for use in French Indo-China.

Naim Frashëri (25 May 1846 – 20 October 1900), a Muslim, was the national poet of Albania. He and his two brothers were central figures in the Albanian National Awakening that sought autonomy from the Ottoman Empire beginning around 1870. Frashëri composed poems in four languages (Albanian, Turkish, Greek, and—his first efforts—Persian) and translated the Iliad and a number of de la Fontaine’s fables. His image has appeared on two different Albanian banknotes since 1992. I find it interesting that in addition to the Albanian stamp, he is honored on one from Iran (the first Iranian stamp we’ve had occasion to display in this series).

Another nationalist artist was the Czech painter František Ženíšek (25 May 1849 – 15 November 1916), who was born and died in Prague, with studies in Vienna, where he assisted at the State Opera, and excursions to Belgium, Paris, and Holland. He worked in murals and other interiors and painted eighty portraits. One of his arresting works, Oldřich and Božena (1884), imagines the legendary meeting between the eleventh century Duke of Bohemia and his bride-to-be. The stamp from 1983 offers a pair of Ženíšek’s drawings, Music and Lyric.

Yes, Filipino painter Anita Magsaysay-Ho (May 25, 1914 – May 5, 2012 ) was related (a cousin) to the country’s president from 1953 to 1957, Ramon Magsaysay, who, incidentally, is honored on a U.S. stamp in our old “Champions of Liberty” series—I place it to the right of the stamp showing his cousin’s painting Three Women With Basket of 1976. This example is typical of her work, which often deals with Filipino women in everyday situations. Born in Manila, Anita Magsaysay was the only woman in the group the Thirteen Moderns. In New York she met the Hong Kong industrialist Robert Ho, who became her husband. The couple lived all over the world, with Magsaysay-Ho always having a convenient studio in which to work.

Someday Sir Ian McKellen (born 25 May 1939) will be seen on a stamp for something other than playing Gandalf in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. New Zealand, where the films have mostly been shot, has issued a wide array of postage stamps on the subject, and other nations have followed suit.

Mike Myers (born 1963) is one of five Canadian comics celebrated on a set of stamps issued three years ago. Discuss.

Irish actor Cillian Murphy (born 1976) has attracted particular attention for his roles in 28 Days Later (2002), three of the Batman movies (as the Caped Crusader’s nemesis Scarecrow), and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), for which he is recognized on one of a set of Irish stamps celebrating the Irish film industry.

I also offer for your delectation a pair of stamps issued for the 75th anniversary of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Today marks the theater’s 109th anniversary. The present theater replaced one that had been built in 1857. The new one opened on 25 May 1908 with a performance of Verdi’s Aïda.

No stamp for Edward Bulwer-Lytton (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873). I bought a handsome 19th-century set of his novels when I was a young man and read several, Pelham, Godolphin, Devereux, The Disowned, Eugene Aram, and enjoyed them. Maybe he’d get more respect if he hadn’t written that line about dark and stormy nights.

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.