Month: January 2021

Categories
Uncategorized

France 1965, The Limbourg Brothers get to illustrate thanks to a generous uncle, a bold Duke, a magnificent Duke, and a confined 12 year old girl

It helps to have talent and important friends. It will not save you from the bubonic plague, but it can allow you to get a lot done. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage. open your picture Bible, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

France offered these oversized, well printed art stamps in the late sixties. Notice how the presentation is much less gaudy than the concurrent middle eastern Dune stamps on similar subjects. Despite being real stamps from a real country, the stamps share with the Dunes the trait of having very little value. I am trying to decide if that is a pity or just a great place to start a stamp collection.

Todays stamp is issue A430, a one Franc stamp issued by France on September 25th, 1965. This was part of a multitude of similarly formatted art stamps all with the one Franc denomination. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 30 cents whether used or unused.

The three Limbourg brothers were born in Nijmegen, Holland in the late 14th century. In 1398 their father died. They were then sent for by their uncle Jean Malouel, there are also Dutch versions of his name, who was a resident artist in the French and Burgundy Royal Courts. He got the three young men apprenticeships with the Paris goldsmithing guild.

On a trip home to visit their widowed mother, the young men were stopped and held for ransom in Brussels that was in a period of chaos. After their mother and the goldsmithing guild were unable to raise the ransom, Phillip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, boldly stepped in and paid the ransom. He did so out of respect for Jean Malouel. Once back in Paris, they were employed on a pet project of Phillip’s, creating an illistrated Bible, the Bible Moralisee. There exist still seven manuscripts of the work, intended for the French Royal families use. Phillip the Bold died in 1404 before the brothers Limbourg had finished the project.

The French Royal House of Valois was impressed with the work of the Limbourg Brothers, and Phillip’s brother, John the Magnificent, the Duke of Berry had a new project in mind for them. He imagined an illustrated devotional book called The very rich hours of the Duke of Berry. In it were over 200 illustrations that idealized Middle Ages life in the international Gothic style. This book is where the image on the stamp comes from. It is titled Leaving for the Hunt.

John the Magnificent as painted by the Limbourg Brothers

Keeping the Limbourg brothers working again became complicated. At age 24 Paul Limbourg fell for a French girl named Gillette. Her parents opposed the match, she was only 12. John the Magnificent had the girl confined until everyone agreed on the marraige. He may have been magnificent but that does not mean he did not overstep. The King intervened and had the girl released. Soon the couple snuck off and eloped.

In the first half of 1416, all under the age of 30, one by one John the Magnificent and all three Limbourg brothers died of the bubonic plague. The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry  was unfinished. A later Duke of Savoy hired later Dutch painters to finish it. It is now in the pocession of the Conde’ Museum near Paris. Gillette survived the plague but hadn’t yet had children.

The cover of “The Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry”

Well my drink is empty. You hear of course that having a Dutch uncle can be very helpful. For the Dutch brothers, having a French one wasn’t so bad either. Come again on Monday when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Categories
Uncategorized

Chile 1970, We need to update our geography, and our postal service

Here we have a Chilean volcano, Choshuenco. We  don’t know too much about when and how often it erupted because the maps in Chile were so bad that it was not clear which volcano might be going off. Many of the early maps of Chile were done by Jesuit Missionaires and in 1768 the Jesuits were forced out of Chile. No maps for you, was perhaps an unintended outcome. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

I am afraid Chile is not going to come across too well in this write up. In addition to the map issue, and the glacier issue we will get into later, we have the matter of the overprint. The overprint signifies that it is a postal tax issue that increases the denomination six fold. What do you do when a post office has a pile of nine year old stamps in such a low denomination that they can no longer get your mail anywhere. You could throw them away of perhaps auction them off to stamp dealers for pennies on the already too few centavos. If you just overprinted a new value you would remind the postal patron how fast prices are rising and by extension how badly managed the government was. So instead the overprint is presented as a postal tax, a one time charge to update the postal system. Was anybody fooled?

Todays stamp is issue RA1, a 12 total centavo postal tax stamp issue of Chile in 1970. It was originally part of an eight stamp issue from 1961. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents whether used or unused or whether or not it is overprinted.

The Chosehuenco volcano lies in the Los Rios region of Chile. It had a sister volcano named Mocho and in the valley between there is a glacier. There is some debate on where the current name of Chosehuenco came from. Some say it is from the Mapuche Indian word for yellow waters. Others think it come from the Indian Chod hu, which translates into water to be dyed yellow. Wonder how the Indians would do that?

The area was first mapped by Jesuit priest Alonso de Ovalle in 1645. He called it Peguipulli because you could see the peak from Lake Penguipuli. That was going to have to do until Abbot Molina published his book in Italy in 1795 on the geography of Chile. Molina had grew up in Chile but has a Jesuit Priest, he was forced into an Italian exile as Chile banished Jesuits in 1768. One can imagine how much his memory of the area had deteriated since leaving so many years before but he did contribute a new name for the volcano, Valdivia. Molina is most famous for noticing and writing about elements of animal evolution 45 years before Charles Darwin. Darwin quoted Molina extensively in his later work. The first reference to the current name was from 1895.

I mentioned that the two volcanos have a glacier between. In 2001, there was a grave report made that the area of the glacier had shrunk 40 percent since 1976. The remaining area was on borrowed time unless something drastic was done. Needless to say nothing drastic was done, you can’t after all snap your fingers and make it colder. Thankfully the doomsday folks have proved pessimistic and nearly 20 years later, there is still a large area of glacier in the area.

Space view of the glacier. The red triangles are the two volcano peaks and the blue-green the glacier.
Abbott Molina in 1795. In his old age he considered returning to independent Chile, but an inheritance that would have made the journey possible, had been seized as unclaimed

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Jesuit Priests with good memories. Come again tomorrow when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Categories
Uncategorized

Thailand 1968, Remembering when the Burmese were running amok, but so were the Ramas

Two centuries and one year after the birth of Rama II. It seems to be a good time to remember the positive. Things had been off course but were coming together in a way familiar to modern Thailand. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

King Rama II was toward the end of the time that the Kingdom was not open to Europeans or Chinese. There is an understandable tendency to romanticize the Royal Court for their poetry and fine palaces. I will be talking more below about succession craziness and constant wars with Burma, but that doesn’t make what the Thais may prefer to remember wrong.

Todays stamp is issue A112, a 50 Satang stamp issued by Thailand on December 30th, 1968. It was a single stamp issue honoring a year and a half late the birth bicentury  of King Rama I. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

From 1350-1768 Siam was ruled by the Ayuthaya Kingdom based in the city of Ayuthaya and extending into modern Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia. In the last days, Ayuthayra was conquered by Burma and Ayuthaya leadership absconded to Bangkok.

There was still Siamese fighting the Burmese including new self declared King Taksin and his military commander the future King Rama I. It is a blessing to this writer that the current Royal line all deem themselves Rama because their Thai names are unspellable and I am not much of a cut and paister. After 15 years on the Throne and the Burmese temporarily chased off, there was a coup and the military commander declared himself King Rama I.

The rules of succession in Siam called for his oldest legitimate son be the next King. The Royal Court however was a pretty wild place and in addition to the Crown Prince’s wife and her legitimate offspring, there was the future Rama IIs relationship with Princess Bunrod, a younger sister by another mother. Finding out that Princess Bunrod was 4 months pregnant, she has banished from the Palace by her and his father Rama I. The Crown Prince begged his father’s forgiveness and negotiated her return as an official concubine. The baby ended up dying shortly after birth.

When King Rama I died in 1809, Rama II was named King. It was now his choice and he promoted his sister/concubine Bunrod to be Queen. She then busied herself making new heirs. His ascension to the Throne caused some troubles. The son of former King Taksin also declared himself King and upon hearing of the death of Rama I, the Burmese again invaded and took what is now called Phuket Island.

Princess Bunrod, later Queen and after a gap, Queen mother

One thing Rama had a lot of was sons and he appointed his original heir Prince Tub to be military commander and deal with the challenges of Taksin II and the Burmese. Prince Tub was successful and gained great esteem but was now part of the wrong line.

Suddenly, he had been healthy, Rama II came down with a deadly case of strangury. Strangury is a very painful condition where a person can pass only frequent but very small streams of urine despite an urgent need. Some think the case was a result of poisoning. When he died it was decided to bypass Bunrod’s young heirs in the official line and name the former Prince Tub as King Rama III. Though Rama III had 51 children he had never raised any of his consorts to Queen. Therefore Bunrod’s young heir got his chance and was named Rama IV.

The craziness of the Royal Court, probably inevitable with self proclaimed Kings did not mean there was not an active Thai culture. Rama II supported  writer of epic poems on Thai history Sunthorn Phu. When he died, Sunthorn Phu left the Royal Court to become a monk but continued to write. A daughter of Rama IV later looked him up and his works were again officially promoted.

Epic poet Sunthorn Phu

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast big Thai families. Come again tomorrow when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.