Lithograving, you inspired me with your postings of Gandon engraving to start a series here focusing on individual engravers (in fact I gave a lecture in 2006 at the Singapore Stamp Club when I lived in Singapore on this very subject). I will start this weekend with Pierre Gandon.
He was born in 1899. His father, Gustave Gandon, as indicated in a previous post, was also an engraver.
Pierre Gandon won the Prix de Rome for engraving in 1921, thus at the age of 22. The Prix de Rome was a very prestigious scholarship for art students created in 1663 during the reign of Louis XIV, and the best competed to win in each category (architecture, painting, scuplture, musical composition and engraving). The engraving category was added in 1804. In the painting category for example, illustrious talents like Manet and Degas attempted and failed to win this coveted prize.
Among the winners in the engraving category were other famous stamp engravers: Henry Cheffer (1906), Jules Piel (1910) and Albert Decaris (1911). I will post on each of these in the coming weekends.
Gandon had to wait until 1941 for his chance, as lithograving said, and engraved a stamp known as 'Native Woman' for the French Colony of Dahomey. I don't have this stamp but I do have one of his earliest efforts (from may 1942). Issued by France itself, also on a colonial theme, it was titled 'Colonial fortnight (quinzaine imperiale)':
Since he was engraving stamps for the Vichy regime, we also find the inevitable portrait of marshal Petain, issued on March 31, 1942:
And given the times, he engraved the equally unpleasant stamp of the 'Tricolour Legion (legion tricolore)', which was really an attempt by the Vichy Government to re-channel the LVF and align it more to French objectives while remaining collaborationist. The LVF, Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, was a Collaborationist French Militia integrated with the Wermacht, whose volunteers fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front:
But the stamp that Gandon was most criticized for at the Liberation and which caused him to be suspended from his job for a few months, was issued in August 1943. It was meant to be a protest against the Allied bombings on strategic targets in France. Those were in fact naval construction sites as well as harbors: Dunkerke, Lorient and St Nazaire, while Billancourt was the site of the Renault factory:
However, Gandon's talent could not be ignored for long, and after being shunned for a short period of time, he was called upon in January 1945 to engrave a stamp commemorating the liberation of Paris:
But that's not all: Gandon liked to recount that during the actual battle for Paris, in the summer of 1944, while he was in is workshop surrounded by resistance fighters (FFI) shooting at Germans, he received a phone call from the French Postmaster. He was told that he had been selected, along with Cheffer and Mazelin, to participate in a contest to design and engrave a portrait of Marianne.
Marianne is a symbol of the French revolution, and the stamp was to be used as the basis for the first main post-war definitive. The judge of the contest was none other than Charles de Gaulle.
Of course, Gandon most probably exaggerated the circumstances of the contest, but it is true that his was the winning design and it was indeed chosen by de Gaulle. Gandon chose his wife Jacqueline as a model for the portrait. Here are two images of her (fairly young and then again much older, in the workshop):
And the famous series 'Marianne de Gandon', a really gorgeous work of engraving, in small and large formats:
And finally, for this first installment, the reason why I love line engraving (otherwise known as intaglio or recess-printing) so much as an art form and by far the most beautiful way to make a postage stamp. This is a comparison between the engraved Marianne and the stamp issued in typography, based on exactly the same design.
And the next installment of the story will be Gandon's career after the war. In fact he engraved French stamps well into his 80's, with his last effort being the series 'Liberte de Gandon' which was first issued in January 1982.