The Wyon City Medal, often called simply The Wyon Medal, is pictured on a card issued by The National Postal Museum. The text on the card reads:

The Wyon City Medal 1837. Engraved by William Wyon and struck to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Accession visit to the City of London. The ‘Wyon’ head on this medal was used for all the stamps of the Queen’s Reign.

National Postal Museum, R M Phillips Collection

Wyon based his engraving on a sketch done when the Princess Victoria was fifteen years old. Rowland Hill decided to use a portrait of the Queen based on Wyon’s medal as the major part of the design of the adhesive stamps that he was planning. Henry Courbould was commissioned by Perkins, Bacon & Petch, the firm that would print the stamps, to create a sketch of the Queen based on the medal.

Charles Heath was then requested to do the engraving of the portrait, but it is generally believed that the work was done by his son, Frederick. The portrait was placed on a die on which the background had already been engraved by the printer. The lettering was then added by William Salter.

On the right is The Penny Black, Britain’s (and the world’s) first postage stamp, produced from the die engraved by Heath and Salter and issued in 1840. This portrait continued to be used on British stamps throughout Queen Victoria’s long reign.

Trivia note: Courbould’s son, Edward, married Charles Heath’s daughter.

As noted on the previous page, Arnold Machin believed that the timelessness of The Penny Black stemmed from the fact that it was based on a sculpture rather than a photograph. He then decided to base his portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on a sculpture as well.

The final portrait is shown on the left. It is a photograph of Machin’s sculpture. The image here is a post card issued by the National Postal Museum in 1981 to coincide with the “Ten Years of the Decimal Machin” exhibition.

On the right is a 1p definitive stamp. It was produced using the electromechanical engraving (EME) method introduced in 1991. It features the digital image of Machin’s original photograph; that image has been used for all Machins since 1997.