Name the most widely reproduced portrait in history. The Mona Lisa? The Laughing Cavalier? Andy Warhol‘s Marilyn Monroe? This game could last a long time.
But, the correct answer probably is: the portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II on the standard issue British postal stamps.
This, it appears, has been reproduced something like 200 billion times. This does sound like an awful lot of stamps, but then a lot of letters have been posted since this design made its debut a little over 40 years ago.
The portrait is a cleverly lit photograph showing a silhouette of a bust of the Queen commissioned by the Post Office from the sculptor Arnold Machin (1911-1999). The plaster bust measures 18 by 16 inches and is stored away in the Post Office museum archives. The Machin portrait replaced a longrunning issue of stamps depicting a very young Queen Elizabeth as portrayed in a three-quarter view photograph by Dorothy Wilding taken in 1952.
Not just a head Machin showed the Queen, then half her current age, from the shoulders up wearing a diadem and pearl necklace. Her hair is beautifully realised. The Queen, who has a good sense of humour, had rejected an earlier idea to show only her head. One of her predecessors, King Charles I, was executed some time after the English civil war and his head held up for the crowd to gawp at. The Queen insisted that she appeared with shoulders and a neck as well as a head.
The stamps remain a model of decorum, of simple, good everyday design and taste. True to tradition – dating back to 1840 – the stamps with the portrait of the Queen bear no national identity. They say nothing in fact. Machin‘s portrait is enough to tell us that this is a stamp from Great Britain. The stamps range from a penny red to a L5 blue, although the most popularly used are the gold First Class, without a denomination, and the blue Second Class stamp.
Long endurance The Machin portrait is unlikely to be replaced during the Queen‘s reign. The Queen herself has made it clear that she likes continuity and that there is little point in changing the portrait every few years just because she is getting older; the point of the image is that it is a symbol of the head of state and not a celebrity snapshot. Given that the Queen Mother lived to be 101 and the Queen herself is in good health, the Machin portrait might well endure six decades.
As for the artist, did he ever kick himself for not asking for a royalty payment? Imagine if he had earned even one per cent of the value of every stamp issued bearing his portrait of the Queen; he would have been a very rich subject indeed. In fact, Machin earned a flat fee of L4,500 – about L60,000 today – and was happy to have been of service to a respected monarch. And, thinking about that 200 billion figure. . . so, if you know of a more widely distributed, printed or seen portrait than Machin‘s Queen Elizabeth II, let us know. What about George Washington on US $1 bills?
The Guardian
O autorovi| Stránku připravila Marta Pelechová
