Art: Post Office Beauty

Last January the U. S. Post Office began issuing a series of “Famous Americans” on postage stamps. It ran through authors, poets, educators, scientists, composers, inventors—five of each. Last week it was busy with artists. Already on sale were Portraitist Gilbert Stuart (1¢), James A. McNeill Whistler (2¢). Out last week went Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens (3¢) and Daniel Chester French Frederic Remington, famed Indian and cowboy painter (10¢), goes on sale next week. The first four artists’ stamps were not likely to make stamp users very art-conscious. They were, respectively, a hideous green, a hackneyed red, a sickly magenta, a commonplace blue, each containing a palette and brushes in one corner, engravers’ tools in another.

When Whistler’s Mother appeared on a U. S. stamp for Mother’s Day 1934, artists shuddered to see an un-Whistlerian bunch of flowers interpolated in the composition. The Post Office avoided artistic blunders when, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Pan-American Union, it issued its best art stamp last spring. From Botticelli’s famed Primavera (Spring) it selected a detail: the lightly clad, swirling Three Graces. But their identity was transmogrified. The Post Office said they were North, Central and South America. Designed by William A. Roach, lettered in 14th-Century style by James T. Vail, the Primavera stamp, larger than the average, was well worth the 3¢ the Post Office asked for it.