Page 43 - Studio International - February 1971

Pre-decimal coins of the Irish Republic
Courtesy: Coins Weekly, London
2, 3 & 4 Postage stamps issued in 1962 to mark
National Productivity Year
Courtesy: GPO, London

2
Family gave up collecting pictures in favour of
collecting postage stamps. There is no question
of making an aesthetic choice, and you get a
good return on your money. The whole question
of the value of old postage stamps is surely a
weird comment on the marketing of old
paintings. A lousy old bit of paper that was once
a stamp can now cost more than a biggish bit of
canvas that was, and is, a picture. And what
about the final absurdity that, in stamps,
3 aesthetic demerit increases financial value, that
wrongly printed examples whoop the price up ?

To think of postage stamps is to think of the
National Portrait Gallery, unique among our
national collections in that it depends neither
upon aesthetic merit (the person painted matters
more than the painter), nor on historical sense
(a VIP lounge for the dead, it includes only
Important People, the governors rather than
the governed). And who can think of the
4 National Portrait Gallery without thinking of
Dr Roy Strong, its trendy and puckish
Director ?
Dr Strong is not particularly noted for any
becoming modesty when the newshounds of the
fashionable press are within earshot. So it was
perhaps easier for him to appear on the platform
of the first meeting of the Campaign Against
Museum Entrance Charges than for the other
directors of publicly-owned galleries who, if
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