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Alderfer: You have a special interest in heraldry.
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| Matthews has designed several sets of stamps with a heraldic theme for Royal Mail. This strip of five was issued on February 24, 1988 and marks the 650th anniversary of the Order of the Garter, the highest British civil and military honor. It also commemorates the 45th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It depicts the Queen’s Beasts, a set of six foot high plaster symbolic creatures that stood guard at Westminster Abbey during the coronation. An enlarged image of one of the stamps is shown below. |
Matthews: I do. This goes back to my early days. My first training was when I was going to be an interior designer. I went to this technical school and in the curriculum was a very wide range of subjects, heraldry being one of them — lettering, ornaments, color, life drawing, and so on. At the time, I don’t suppose I appreciated why we had heraldry and why we had lettering, but I now realize that it’s such a wonderful training ground for space filling and texturing and using color. I love it, and I really concentrated on heraldry and lettering. They were the things I loved the most. It was later on in my time that a very good friend of mine got a scholarship to the Royal College of Arts. I went out and earned a living. It was at that point when he was going to go to the college that he was talking about going to graphic design school, and I realized there was this thing called graphic design. The scales fell from my eyes, and I realized that somebody had to think about all these things [like signs and labels]. So that’s really how I got interested in that world. And my friend got his place at the college and I used to meet up often with him, so by proxy, I got all the feedback from these professors through him. I began to absorb things, so really I was self-taught in graphics. I never went to graphic design school. I went to the occasional bit of evening class on a particular subject. That’s how I got started.
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| An enlargement of one of the stamps picturing the Queen’s Beasts. The black was printed by intaglio (also known as line engraving or recess printing), allowing very fine lines. The colors were printed by lithography. |
And if your next question is going to be how I got started with Royal Mail...At that time there was a government sponsored organization called the Council of Industrial Design, which still lives under another name, the Design Council. Their function, amongst other things, was to establish a record of designers. And that meant that someone like me could put myself forward and say this is my work, this is what I do. If they felt you were good enough material, they would have some examples of your work and a short description of what you did. Then prospective clients requiring a designer — in any medium, incidentally, it might have been a product designer or graphic designer — could apply to the Council. They would then supply them with a short list, maybe a half dozen names at most, of the designers who were in their records who they thought were most useful for the task. And I believe it went that if the prospective client became a client of the designer, he would pay some fee to the Council, but I don’t know about that. It was totally free for designers; it was a very nice showcase.
It was that way I think I got to be with Royal Mail. That was before Royal Mail had their own design division at all. It was very much a civil service operation, not a government department. You got a very, very formal brief to what the subject of the stamps required. There was no question of meeting anyone like a design director and discussing what you did. You had to think your own thoughts, do your own thing, submit it all under great secrecy and cover — anonymously, I think, with numbers instead of names. I believe in those days, too, they might have well asked up 10 or 12 people to submit. You were paid a half fee. To me it was an incredible fee — I can’t remember what it was now but it was beyond my wildest dreams — and if in fact you were successful, you had that fee again, for which you might have to do a few modifications or whatever. That was for the Post Office Tercentenary, the 300th anniversary of their charter, for which they required two stamps, and I submitted designs in 1959. To my great encouragement I was short-listed and went to essay, but in fact mine were not published. Two other designs were published. And then from time to time I was asked to submit for different subjects, and my first successfully adopted designs were for the United Nations 20th anniversary which was issued in 1965. And so that set me on my lifetime’s association with Royal Mail. It has gone on to this very day.
Rosenblum: One of your commemoratives that
I’m particularly fond of is the
Queen’s 60th Birthday [in 1986], the one with six photographs
representing the six decades of her life. What really attracts me is the
way you used the right-hand image on each stamp to be both the
identifier and one of the six portraits. How did you come up with that
idea?
Matthews: I’m glad you like that one. It’s one of my favorites as well. First off, I was simply briefed that they wanted a commemoration of the Queen’s 60th birthday. There would be two values. I went off in the usual way to ponder this. At that time, my late wife, Chris, was around, and she collaborated with me, particularly on research. She and I used to chat about the latest challenge, and I can’t really remember exactly whether it was my idea or hers or if it was something that came about all of a sudden. The idea came about anyway, wouldn’t it be good if we could have a picture of the Queen from each of the decades of her life? But I couldn’t see getting six pictures on one stamp. As is my way, I went back to the design director and said, would you consider a se-tenant pair? Fortunately, the answer was yes.
Now we could begin to see how it would work, three pictures on a stamp. The whole thing rested on the good fortune — Dame Fortune smiling upon us — that in her third decade this particular lady became the Queen and so the [third] photograph was of the reigning monarch. Had it not been for that, I couldn’t have used the idea at all. So in fact you probably realized that I used the original Dorothy Wilding portrait that was on the first stamps of her reign, which made an added interest to it. The other one had a fairly recent portrait at that time, by [Lord] Snowdon. It happened to fit the bill because she had the diadem on her head.
Then it was a matter of selecting from an enormous amount of photographs. You’d be amazed how difficult it was for somebody who was the most photographed person in the universe. The number of photographs that we had to throw out. Chris did a lot of my research, she got loads of royalty photos, and there was always somebody else just behind [the Queen]. There was one photograph I remember looking at and seeing that there was something odd about the Queen, the profile … everything had gone a bit funny, and [then] we realized that the photograph had a perfect image of another person standing right behind her who showed minutely in places. You’d never believe it. And even the one where I showed her in her uniform with the changing of the guard, we had to retouch out Princess Margaret looking over her shoulder.
It was quite difficult to actually come up with those pictures. The baby ones weren’t so bad because there weren’t so many of them, and they’re nice baby pictures. She wasn’t too much of a baby, about 18 months or two years. The next one along, contrary to popular belief, is not a military uniform. She was wearing a military badge of the Grenadier Guards. I think it was a special costume she had made. She was only sixteen, and she had been made Colonel-in-chief of the Grenadier Guards, an honorary position. It was one of her first public appearances, so she was in a special costume.
And then one of her photos on the other stamp [shows the Queen] with the camera, which I understood only today was a Leica. I had a visitor who only collects stamps to do with photography. He was very interested in that because the camera was a Leica. It was the first I knew about that. I deliberately put that in because it was the Queen getting her own back.
The problem I foresaw in presentation was that my usual way of presenting a design is in stamp size. I work stamp-size in the first place, and I always try to present my design at stamp size in a visual form. It might not quite be the finished visual. I don’t consider myself a portrait artist, and I didn’t want to have people sidelined by my renderings of the portrait, and I didn’t want the poor likenesses of the Queen to prevent the Stamp Advisory Committee from appreciating the design. By then, of course, I had dealt with computers. I never actually got involved with computers myself directly, but I knew a man who had, and this friend of mine was running a business. So I prepared my layouts, my hand lettering with the particular inscriptions, my photographs, and I submitted all these bits to do with the layouts, which he in due course fed into the computer.
And then it was really quite exciting for me because it was the first time I had seen my own design realized in any form at all on screen — the open panels, the shapes where the portraits would be, the lettering, the dummy perforations, and then seeing how the pictures grew up from the bottom in the colors I had already chosen from the printer’s chart. It was quite exciting for me, and at that point I was able to manipulate it a bit, not directly myself, but with this gentleman sitting next to me, I said, could you move the head over a tiny bit, make it a bit smaller, alter the color one degree less green, and he got it absolutely how I wanted it into a se-tenant pair.
Then of course he was able to print it out stamp-sized, as well as fairly large. I usually like to do the large thing for the [Stamp Advisory] Committee, because people sit in the committee room. We designers are never at the actually committee meeting, by the way, but I like to present something four times stamp size. It is on record, it got back to me, that this was the first and I believe only time that the committee gave a round of applause to the designer in his absence during the presentation. It went just like that, they were so knocked out by idea of the se-tenant pair.
Rosenblum: I was curious about the fact that you’ve been written up in Royal Mail’s publicity as “the great modern master of stamp design” in one of the brochures.
Matthews: Fortunately, I didn’t know that.
Rosenblum: Is this the first time that you’ve gotten public recognition and visibility for your work? Stamp collectors have known about it for a long time but...
Matthews: This must have been, from what you’ve just read out, this must be the most flamboyant occasion. There have been obviously lesser times — I’ve been to different signings. I was at Wembley a couple of years ago where they did a special cover, so I suppose there has been a degree of publicity that has taken place through different stamp magazines. From time to time, I have been publicized.
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| Jeffery Matthews designed this logo for the Machin Collectors Club. |
Alderfer: What else have you done other than postage stamps?
Matthews: The general gamut of things that a graphic designer might tackle, such things as signs and symbols. I had the honor, if that’s what you might call it, of designing the Inland Revenue symbol, but that was through Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. I’ve done a lot of official symbolism like that and heraldry. More recently I did a drawing of St. Edward’s Crown for a double-volume on the crown jewels. I’ve done a lot of lettering in different forms — book jackets, brochures, things like that, and quite a lot of packaging. I used to work for a company as a freelance artist, designing labels for ranges of products. I did many different forms of graphic design. I still do a certain amount of packaging and publicity for a coffee merchant that I know, in the West End here, a small family firm. I keep a few clients going now, not very many. I’ve cut down a lot on the work that I do. I also recently did the back of the millennium five pound piece for the Royal Mint.
Rosenblum: Mr. Matthews, thank you very much for your time.
Matthews: You are welcome.
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| Last update: September 22, 2007 |
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| Copyright © 2007 by Great Britain Collectors Club | ||