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Something different for Christmas

The Stamp Collecting Report, I'm Lloyd de Vries. 

What's a Christmas card without a Christmas stamp? The U-S Postal Service always has 
a religious-themed stamp for the holidays. 

Most of the past ones feature Madonna and Child paintings from the Renaissance. This year's 
is from Peru in the mid-seventeen-hundreds.

"It's exciting to have a stamp from a painting produced in the Americas."
RUNS :04

Donna Pierce is curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum, where Ignacio 
Chacon's Madonna and Child with Bird is on display. It's different than the European 
paintings often used for Christmas stamps.

"Stylistically, it shows the mix of European art with Native American traditions."
RUNS :07

There's extensive use of a gold overlay in the Chacon, and red and blue are also dominant, 
says Pierce. There's also a bird in the painting. <There are flowers in the painting, and 
also a bird.>

"This bird is a lovely red and blue bird, which is distinctive of the Inca iconography and
imagery."
RUNS :06

Something else that's different about this painting from the usual ones on which Christmas 
stamps are based: It DOESN'T hang in an East Coast museum....but Pierce says the Denver Art 
Museum didn't lobby for it.

"We had a stamp that was chosen four years ago as part of the Navajo textile series, and when 
the representatives of the Postal Service were in Denver for the unveiling of that stamp, they 
decided to look at some of our other pieces."
RUNS :15

I'm Lloyd de Vries of The Virtual Stamp Club. For more about stamps and stamp collecting, visit
virtual-stamp-club-dot-com		 

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