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-c-), James A. McNeill Whistler (2-c-). Out last week went Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens (3-c-) and Daniel Chester French Frederic Remington, famed Indian and cowboy painter (10-c-), 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-c- the Post Office asked for it.

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