[Illustration: ORIGINAL SKETCH FOR THE "CANOE" TYPE OF FIJI STAMPS.]
"DEAR SIR,--Certainly the picture was painted by me. It was exhibited in the R.A. about 15 or 18 years since. It was named by me 'The Vanguard.' The picture belongs now, I believe, to Lord Blythswood, near Glasgow. It is published as an etching by Dunthorne, Vigo Street.
A more scarce engraving, which was the basis of some of the most classic designs in the history of postage-stamps, is the mezzotint by Samuel Cousins, A.R.A., of the portrait of Queen Victoria painted by Alfred Edward Chalon, R.A., in 1837. The original picture was a present from the Queen to her mother, the Duchess of Kent, as a souvenir of Her Majesty's visit to the House of Lords to prorogue Parliament on July 17, 1837. According to _The Athenæum_, the original picture "may take its place as _the_ portrait, whether in right of the likeness, which is faithful and characteristic, or in right of its artistic treatment." From the mezzotint Edward Henry Corbould, the son of the artist of the "Penny Black" of Great Britain, made a drawing in water colours, from which the engraver William Humphrys produced the fine miniature for the first stamps of New Zealand.
In a number of cases photographs have provided the subject for stamp vignettes, and here the collector is able, if he takes a little trouble, to procure copies for extra-illustrating his collection. The photograph of the Llandovery Falls in Jamaica, used on the picture stamp of that colony in 1900, was an unauthorised copy of one of a published series of local views; that of the Victoria Falls on the 1905 stamps of the British South Africa Company recently formed a frontispiece to _The Stamp Lover_ (October, 1910). The subject of the quaint vignette on the British New Guinea and Papua stamps was engraved from a photograph taken by a naval officer, and I traced a copy to the collection of a returned missionary.
Bank-note and other engravings of a like character have provided copies for stamp pictures, and Lord Crawford has formed a truly magnificent historical collection of the United States stamps, in which his lordship, in the course of about forty volumes, traces each design to its inception, in some cases to the first rough pencil sketch. He endeavours to show every stage in the development of the stamp, and, as every philatelist should do, he follows the stamp through its period of currency, showing the different kinds of obliterations, the varying shades of successive printings, and where they exist re-issues, reprintings, and forgeries. His lordship's collections of Great Britain and of the Italian States are equally comprehensive, but that this manner of collecting is not entirely exclusive is evidenced by the number of collectors who have formed really worthy individual "association albums"--to borrow an expressive term--of the stamps of these same countries.
