Great-Britain 1991 - focus

Great Britain

23rd April 1991 - "European aerospace"
design: Jean-Michel Folon
printer: Harrison & Sons Ltd

Many stamp collectors collects stamps related to space. They call it astrophilately or space philately. 1991 must have been an interesting Europa stamps year for all those collectors (as later 2009 with the Astronomy theme) but for my part space on stamps is not really my cup of tea. Rockets, satellites is a bit boring to me.

But two countries that year issued stamps with a more poetic touch, the Netherlands and Great-Britain. I will focus in this post on the British issue as I love the designer of those stamps : Jean-Michel Folon.



Folon was a Belgian painter and sculptor who produced many posters but also many stamps during his life. The set he produced for Great-Britain in 1991 is composed of 2 pairs of stamps. The first pair is called "Man looking at Space" and the second one "Space looking at Man". It is a very poetic point of view showing space through the eyes of man, how small we are in front of this immensity lost on our little blue planet. In the first pair of stamps the cosmos is our head as a dream and in the second one in our eyes more like a kind of reality.

If you are visiting Belgium one day, the Folon foundation in La Hulpe (near Brussels) is really worth a visit !