Art

The 1924 flying pigeon stamp is one of the icons of Dutch postal history. An equally special precursor appeared three years earlier: the airmail stamp with the seagull. This bird comes to life again almost a hundred years later on…

The Māori people brought the beginnings of their art with them from their ancient homeland in Polynesia when they migrated to New Zealand more than 1,000 years ago and they developed those beginnings to new plateaus over successive generations. Wood…

Shown below is a small selection from the thousands of new stamps added to PostBeeld’s stock recently. A 1956 stamp showing the provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan that came together to form modern Libya in 1951. We have added…

The ancestors of New Zealand’s Māori people arrived in canoes from Pacific islands before 1300 AD. The Māori had no written language and thus their history and legends were passed on orally from generation to generation, and through carving and…

As a child I was always fascinated by the puzzle of how it was possible to place a quite sizeable model of a ship inside a narrow-necked bottle. One of my uncles, an ex-navy man, had a beautiful example in…

1981 was proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations to be the International Year of Disabled Persons. Although many countries issued stamps featuring various disabilities that year, they were by no means the first stamps issued regarding the…

What do we see when we look at the drawing on the stamp from Austria (1981) above? Several artists, notably the Dutch ‘master of optical illusion’ Maurits Escher, have incorporated into their designs certain impossible features that cannot exist in three-dimensional…

The city of Appeldoorn in Holland has, aside from other interesting attractions, a fine museum which currently has an exhibition called Paper Art. One of the exhibitors whose work is featured is Dutch artist Erik van Maarschalkerwaard. He has on display many…

The beauty of New Zealand is undisputed by those fortunate enough to have visited the country. Indeed, in 2010 NZ Post issued a lovely 25-value mini-sheet depicting some of the highlights to be seen on the country’s North and South…

The 1970s was a prominent period of large scale socio-political change and counterculture during which people felt increasingly at-ease to express themselves through music, fashion and leisure pursuits and this was no different in the Channel Island, Jersey. The six-stamp…

The Spanish Civil War had a dramatic effect on the artist Pablo Picasso’s outlook on life. Not having previously been a man interested in politics, the 1936 Franco uprising in Spain was an event that dragged him out of this…

In this second part of the story we provide an analysis of the song Bohemian Rhapsody. Freddie Mercury never really gave a clear explanation about the meaning of the song’s lyrics. The text contains many philosophical and religious elements. According…

In 2011 there was a great commotion in the United States about a 44c first class stamp with a close-up of the face of the Statue of Liberty. An attentive philatelist discovered some suspicious details on the stamp and on…

If you’re wondering what this photograph has to do with philately keep reading! Australia has hundreds of abandoned grain silos dotted around the country. Many people think they are a bit of a blot on the landscape but the boring…

Below you can see just a small selection of stamps recently added to PostBeeld’s enormous stock of stamps. Please visit the website if you wish to view more. If you are a particular collector of Germany, Thurn and Taxis stamps…

There have been many postage stamps imprinted with more than one language but the first from Great Britain was issued in 1968. This was the Menai Bridge stamp, part of a set featuring British bridges. The Menai Bridge connects mainland…