Benin windmill stamps (cinderellas)
Fred Atkins, the editor of Windmill Whispers, the quarterly bulletin of the
Windmill Study Unit,
which is primarily (but not exclusively!) interested in mills and milling as shown on
stamps and other philatelic items,
has sent me some pictures, and the following request:
Our unit has checklists of hundreds of stamps showing mills of most types. In addition to genuine stamps,
there have also been printed considerable numbers of "cinderella" stamps of mills, being invalid postally,
but picturesque and interesting nevertheless. There have been a number of attractive sheetlets purported
to have been issued by the African country of
Benin,
showing paintings of mill scenes (including some printed back-to-front!) by a number of artists which we have identified;
however, I attach a half-dozen which so far are unknown to us and I was wondering therefore whether you could
kindly add them to your website with a request that we would like to know the location of the mills,
the artists, and if possible where the paintings are exhibited.
The mills shown on no. 5 are clearly the Moulin de la Galette and the Moulin Radet in Montmartre
but I'm not sure about the artist. I would guess Maurice Utrillo.
Update:
I've managed to identify all the stamp images as follows:
- "Ice Skaters on a Frozen Pond" by Henri Rousseau (matched with the help of TinEye to
this poster and hence to
Corbis image)
- Inner stamp: "In Holland" by Gari Melchers (creative guesswork found
Corbis image), Outer image: unidentified
- ca. 1932-1937. Dutch Windmill by Canal from the Scheufler Collection (creative guesswork found
Corbis image)
- "Memories of Army Maneuvers" by Edouard Detaille (creative guesswork found
Corbis image)
- "Moulin de la Galette" in the Style of Maurice Utrillo, from Bass Museum of Art, Miami (creative guesswork found
Corbis image)
- "Scuola Olandese" (Dutch School) Fiume gelato con pattinatori (Frozen river with ice skaters),
Galleria Sabauda, Torino/Art Resource NY (matched using Google Goggles to being used on the book cover of
Western Heritage, and the
"look inside" feature allowed the description to be read. With the gallery name, a normal image search
then turned up
Corbis image)
- "The Great Windmill and the Rainbow" by Jean Charles Cazin (creative guesswork found
Corbis image)
You can probably spot a theme there - I strongly suspect that the producers of these stamps simply did
a search at Corbis to find all their images.
See also:Just one windmill painting stamp we can't identify (28/6/11)
See also:A technical article on identifying images (10/1/10)
Tags: [
stamps]
[
paintings]
Item: #747,
Posted: 9/1/10.
