Piotr Jerzy Naszarkowski (born 1952) is a Polish engraver, known particularly for his portrait engraving. [1] He has engraved on many supports: book illustrations, banknotes, postage stamps, etc.
Born in 1952 in Warsaw, Poland, [2] he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw. [1] From 1978 to 1980, he worked as stage designer for the Guliwer puppet theatre .[ citation needed ] He started out working as a scenographer for Polish television, but he quit in 1981 with other artists to protest the proclamation of the martial law after the Solidarność union's strike. [1]
Naszarkowski became an apprentice at the state printers under Barbara Kowalska where he was taught engraving. [1] He was given a full-time job and his first stamp was published in 1985. [1] He also engraved stamps for the Polish Rulers series, which began in 1986, including one of Casimir the Restorer. [1] Because recess printing was going out of fashion, Naszarkowski designed less than 10 stamps during his time at the state printers. [1] He became well-known when his ex-libris Lucas Cranach was printed in Belgium.
In 1989, Naszarkowski moved to Sweden and got a job with the Swedish postal service, initially as an employee but later as a freelancer. [1] His reputation increased and, from 1991, he was designing several stamps a year. [1]
His 99th and 100th stamps were issued September 2005 for the Greta Garbo joint issue between Sweden and the United States.
Naszarkowski was well-known for his portrait engraving and produced stamps of Alva Myrdal, Astrid Lindgren as well as many private studies, including of Ingrid Bergman, Pope John Paul II and fellow Polish engraver Czesław Słania. [1] After Słania's death in 2005, Naszarkowski's portrait was turned into a tribute cinderella stamp and Naszarkowski took on many of Słania's unfinished projects. [1]
In 2017, Cartor was awarded the contract for Sweden's stamp printing, resulting in the end of recess printed stamps and, therefore, Naszarkowski's retirement. [1]
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing images on paper as prints or illustrations; these images are also called "engravings". Engraving is one of the oldest and most important techniques in printmaking. Wood engraving is a form of relief printing and is not covered in this article, same with rock engravings like petroglyphs.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) is a government agency within the United States Department of the Treasury that designs and produces a variety of security products for the United States government, most notable of which is Federal Reserve Notes for the Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank. In addition to paper currency, the BEP produces Treasury securities; military commissions and award certificates; invitations and admission cards; and many different types of identification cards, forms, and other special security documents for a variety of government agencies. The BEP's role as printer of paper currency makes it one of two Treasury Department agencies involved in currency production. The other is the United States Mint, which mints coinage. With production facilities in Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, Texas, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is the largest producer of government security documents in the United States.
Posten, the Swedish mail service, was established in 1636 by Axel Oxenstierna, and by the 18th century it had been extended throughout the country.
Czesław Słania was a Polish postage stamp and banknote engraver, living in Sweden from 1956. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Słania was the most skilled and prolific of all stamp engravers, with over 1000 stamps to his credit. His 1000th engraved stamp, based on the 17th-century painting "Great Deeds by Swedish Kings" by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (2000), is in the Guinness Book as the largest engraved stamp ever issued.
Intaglio is the family of printing and printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface and the incised line or sunken area holds the ink. It is the direct opposite of a relief print where the parts of the matrix that make the image stand above the main surface.
The Machin series of postage stamps was the main definitive stamp series in the United Kingdom for most of the reign of Elizabeth II, from 1967 until her death in 2022. Introduced on 5 June 1967, it was the second series of her reign, replacing the Wilding series. The last issue was on 4 April 2022, four months before the Queen's death on 8 September.
Numerous Chinese stamps depict Sun Yat-sen, and a representative collection can be acquired with little trouble. These may conveniently be divided as the definitives, provincial issues, overprints, and commemoratives, but there is much crossover between these categories.
The Columbian Issue, also known as the Columbians, is a set of 16 postage stamps issued by the United States to commemorate the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago during 1893. The finely-engraved stamps were the first commemorative stamps issued by the United States, depicting various events during the career of Christopher Columbus and are presently much valued by collectors.
David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl was a Swedish nobleman and portrait painter.
Canadian Landscape is the third series of banknotes of the Canadian dollar issued by the Bank of Canada, first circulated in 1954. The banknotes were designed in 1952 following the accession of Elizabeth II to the throne after the death of her father George VI. The banknote designs differed significantly from the preceding 1937 Series banknotes, though the denomination colours and bilingual printing were retained. This series was followed by the 1969 Scenes of Canada series.
The Castle series or Castle High Value series are two definitive stamp series issued in the United Kingdom during Queen Elizabeth II's reign. The common aspects of the two series are the four chosen castles, one for each country of the United Kingdom.
Jan Victor Armas Lindblad was a Swedish naturalist, writer, photographer, film maker, and whistling artist who imitated animals.
Poczta Polska, the Polish postal service, was founded in 1558 and postal markings were first introduced in 1764. The three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795 saw the independent nation of Poland disappear. The postal services in the areas occupied by Germany and Austria were absorbed into those countries' postal services. In 1772 the area occupied by Austria was created into the Kingdom of Galicia, a part of the Austrian Empire. This lasted till 1918. The Duchy of Warsaw was created briefly, between 1807 and 1813, by Napoleon I of France, from Polish lands ceded by the Kingdom of Prussia under the terms of the Treaties of Tilsit. In 1815, following Napoleons' defeat in 1813, the Congress of Vienna, created Congress Poland out of the Duchy of Warsaw and also established the Free City of Kraków. Congress Poland was placed under the control of Russia and the postal service was given autonomy in 1815. In 1851 the postal service was put under the control of the Russian post office department regional office in St Petersburg. In 1855 control was restored for a while to the Congress Kingdom but following the uprising in 1863 again came under Russian control from 1866 and continued until World War I. In November 1918 the Second Polish Republic was created.
William Humphrys was an engraver of pictures, book illustrations and postage stamps.
'Seahorses' is the name used to refer to the United Kingdom high value definitive postage stamps issued during the reign of King George V.
Presidents of the United States have frequently appeared on U.S. postage stamps since the mid-19th century. The United States Post Office Department released its first two postage stamps in 1847, featuring George Washington on one, and Benjamin Franklin on the other. The advent of presidents on postage stamps has been definitive to U.S. postage stamp design since the first issues were released and set the precedent that U.S. stamp designs would follow for many generations.
The Regular Issues of 1922–1931 were a series of 27 U.S. postage stamps issued for general everyday use by the U.S. Post Office. Unlike the definitives previously in use, which presented only a Washington or Franklin image, each of these definitive stamps depicted a different president or other subject, with Washington and Franklin each confined to a single denomination. The series not only restored the historical tradition of honoring multiple presidents on U.S. Postage but extended it. Offering the customary presidential portraits of the martyred Lincoln and Garfield, the war hero Grant, and the founding fathers Washington and Jefferson, the series also memorialized some of the more recently deceased presidents, beginning with Hayes, McKinley, Cleveland and Roosevelt. Later, the deaths of Harding, Wilson and Taft all prompted additions to the presidential roster of Regular Issue stamps, and Benjamin Harrison's demise (1901) was belatedly deemed recent enough to be acknowledged as well, even though it had already been recognized in the Series of 1902. The Regular Issues also included other notable Americans, such as Martha Washington and Nathan Hale—and, moreover, was the first definitive series since 1869 to offer iconic American pictorial images: these included the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol Building and others. The first time (1869) that images other than portraits of statesmen had been featured on U.S. postage, the general public disapproved, complaining that the scenes were no substitute for images of presidents and Franklin. However, with the release of these 1922 regular issues, the various scenes—which included the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial and even an engraving of an American Buffalo—prompted no objections. To be sure, this series presented pictorial images only on the higher-value stamps; the more commonly used denominations, of 12 cents and lower, still offered the traditional portraits.
Joseph Saunders,, sometimes also Joseph Sanders, was an English engraver, illustrator, publisher and professor of fine art. He was active in London, Saint Petersburg and Wilno. He has sometimes become conflated with the London painter and miniaturist, Joseph Saunders. Professor Anthony Cross suggests a further confusion with a 'John Saunders', born 1750, who also went to Russia.
Leonard Douglas Fryer was a British artist and designer. The son of a steel engraver, he worked for the printers Waterlow and Sons, preparing proposed designs for material to be produced by the firm such as stamps and banknotes. In 2019, a collection of his watercolour paintings for stamp and banknote designs was sold at auction after being found in a wardrobe 40 years after his death.
Fluorine etching is a printmaking technique developed by a circle of artists working in Kraków and Warsaw in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It is likely that both the detrimental effects on the health of engravers and the fragility of the material resulted in this technique being abandoned.