Britain was first. And that means British stamps have been identified first and foremost just by a royal portrait.
No need for a name: no GB, no UK, no nothing, just a picture and a value.
Those pictures have come and gone, sometimes they’ve been unpopular.
Some are loved.
All of them become familiar images in everyday life.
I know I’m not alone in finding the appearance of King Charles III on stamps a somewhat jarring experience.
It’s not the portrait - it’s just the change.
These images are woven into our national life. And some feature on highly desirable collector's pieces.
Here is the story of British royal portraits on stamps.
Queen Victoria
The Wyon head
Queen Victoria loved the Wyon image so much it remained basically unchanged in place throughout her reign. This wonderful example is from 1882.
William Wyon is as important to the history of stamps and stamp collecting as Rowland Hill and Queen Victoria.
It’s Wyon’s portrait head of Queen Victoria that heralded the dawning of a new age of mass communication, and set the pattern for many portraits to come in the UK and around the world.
Wyon was a well-known and prolific engraver, a Royal Academy member, when he started to produce portraits of the new Queen Victoria to grace the nation’s coinage.
And in 1834 he made the engraving that is probably his most famous. The Queen was just 15, and a princess at the time.
When, in 1837, as a Queen, she visited the City of London, Wyon’s “young head” was struck onto a celebratory medal.
And it is this image that went onto the Penny Black, and every other Victorian stamp.
There were slight variations along the way, but until she died, as an 81-year-old Queen Victoria was represented by a teenage image of herself that she was known to love.
Buy Queen Victoria stamps here.
Edward VII
Fuchs head
Fuchs' portrait was used throughout Edward's reign, this issue is dated after his death.
Emil Fuchs is the artist behind the rather nice profile of Edward VII that grace stamps issued during his reign from 1901 to 1910.
If you’re thinking that’s not a very English sounding name you’re right. Fuchs was Austrian by birth, but had become a successful portraitist who the British upper crust loved. Sadly, a wave of anti-German sentiment at the outbreak of World War I pushed him into moving to the US permanently.
He painted Edward, and his mother Victoria a number of times (he produced a well-known image of her lying in state), but a special sitting was arranged to create the stamp image.
The big question for postal authorities was over which way Edward should look.
Since the 17th century British monarchs had faced the opposite direction from their predecessors on coins. Edward was the first new ruler to get a stamp so there was no precedent. In the end, he faced the same way as his mother, looking to the left and further cementing the invented habit of sticking stamps at the top-right of an envelope, with the monarch looking into the paper.
Fuchs continued to enjoy a successful career in New York, but faced with a painful and certain death from cancer he chose to shoot himself to death in 1928.
He left a substantial artistic legacy and a large financial one, some of which went to finance permanent exhibits of his work. Head to the Brooklyn Museum to see a lot of it today.
King George V
The Downey Head
The Downey Head looks wonderful in this proof, but it didn't translate well to finished stamps.
Every GB stamp collector knows George V loved stamps.
He is the collector king, one of the most important figures in the history of the Royal Philatelic Collection.
This interest pre-dated his accession to the throne, and he was very keen to have good stamps during his reign.
The result was a three-quarter portrait called the Downey Head, after royal photographers W & D Downey, who supplied the portrait.
Unfortunately, it did not work well on a stamp. Experts say they were poorly printed.
As a result a minor rarity was created when most of the planned new stamps were withdrawn after just the 1/2d and 1d had been issued.
The Mackennal portrait
A more conventional profile was more successful, and here is Mackennal's head on the famous "seahorses" design.
A new portrait was sought, and Australian artist Bertram Mackennal stepped in. His profile portrait was used until the end of the king’s reign in 1936.
Mackennal enjoyed a long association with the royal family, and was the first Australian artist to receive a knighthood.
He was a prominent producer of public art, and along with coin portraits, his sculptures were the focal points of a number of war memorials.
Buy George V stamps here.
King Edward VIII
The king who quit is beloved of stamp and coin collectors.
But, although the coins planned (but not produced) for his short reign are among the rarest of all British issues, there are enough stamps to make them affordable for ordinary buyers.
There was time to use two portraits on his stamps, and among Edward’s reported strong-headedness in all matters can be counted a firm opinion on their design.
A member of the public, Hubert Brown, then a schoolboy, sent in a lovely, simple design.
The Post Office basically used it, though only after writing back to Brown to tell him his idea was no good.
These very modern-looking definitive stamps feature a portrait from Hugh Cecil’s photograph studio. Cecil was much loved by fashionable London, and was perfect for the playboy prince. His stamp portraits are beautifully lit and rather austere.
Although Edward abdicated the throne within a year, these stamps aren’t rare, though preparatory stages of their production and some Empire issues from the reign are extremely valuable.
Buy Edward VIII stamps here.
King George VI
A photograph was given a cameo look by illustrator Edmund Dulac in what was very much a team effort.
Out with Edward, in with his brother George, who was subbed in for a coronation date set for the runaway monarch.
Stamps were needed in a hurry, and a broadly similar design was used with a portrait by Bertram Park.
Park’s portraits were used officially throughout the 1930s. His later career took in a lot of theatrical work and produced a large body of naturist photography.
The photograph was rendered into a stamp head by Edmund Dulac, a French-born artist who had a very long, varied and distinguished career in book illustration, newspaper and magazine work, theatre design and more. He also helped to produce bank notes for the Free French during WWII.
Eric Gill (whose widespread sexual abuse is now known and is prompting some reexamination of his work’s prominence in British public life) designed the frames for the stamps.
Dulac would later design frames for the first Elizabethan stamps.
Buy King George VI stamps here.
Queen Elizabeth II
The Wilding Head
Wilding's portrait is among the most obviously photographic yet used on a GB stamp.
In Dulac’s frames went an image.
No doubt, Edmund would have liked it to be his submitted portrait, but instead a photograph by Dorothy Wilding was chosen.
Dorothy Widling was an established royal photographer, and though her portrait work was not used for George VI definitives, her picture of the king and queen did go on the coronation stamp of 1937 (which Edmund Dulac designed).
Wilding’s firm took portrait photographs of a rosta of British and American notables (she had a New York studio from the 1930s) including a woman called Wallace Simpson.
The Wilding Head was used on definitives, but was hard to incorporate into commemorative stamps that needed other design elements.
The Machin Head
Machin Heads are hard to beat as a stamp portrait.
In order, in part, to solve the problem for commemorative designers, a new portrait of the queen was commissioned for 1967.
The resulting Machin Series is one of the most successful in British philatelic history. Three attempts to replace the portrait were thwarted, sometimes by the queen’s intervention in favour of an image she reportedly loved.
The original effigy was made by Arnold Machin in 1964, using a portrait by Lord Snowdon as its base.
Although the Machin Head is simple and instantly recognisable it has been through numerous minor changes in its five decades of use.
Machin’s artistic roots were in ceramics, and his design was put onto stamps as a photograph of his clay sculpture.
On stamps and coins (for which it was used until 1981) it must be among the most widely seen works of art in history.
Machin had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II, but had an otherwise quiet life, with the exception of a protest against the removal of a lamppost from his street.
He was granted his own appearance on a stamp in a 2007, 40-year anniversary issue for the Machin Head.
Buy Queen Elizabeth stamps here.
King Charles III
In time, perhaps collectors will call the first Charles III portrait, the Jennings Head.
It is a photograph of a sculpture by Martin Jennings, whose work (including portraits of poets John Betjemin and Philip Larkin) is all over the UK.
The sculpture was also used on the first Charles III coins, both have been digitally treated to suit them to their particular use.
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