Guernsey Post announces that it has produced an exhibition miniature sheet to celebrate Valentine’s Day, for release at Spring Stampex 2018 (14-17 February 2018).
The stamps, which will be issued on Valentine’s Day, feature ‘The View from the Lover’s Chair’, which is the work of Paul Jacob Naftel, Guernsey’s most famous and successful artist during the 19th century.
Born in 1817, Naftel was a self-taught artist who specialised in watercolour landscapes, painting many of the Island’s beautiful bays and landmarks as well as teaching drawing at Guernsey’s Elizabeth College. Many of his early Island scenes were reproduced as lithographs and sold to tourists.
His first wife, Elizabeth Robilliard, was from nearby Alderney, home also to the Sister Rocks, two large rocks off the Island’s South coast and the natural seat, known as The Lover’s Chair, which is the scene for Naftel’s painting ‘The View from the Lover’s Chair’, depicted across the two stamps.
This secluded seat first bore the name La Chaise de L’Emauve but later became known as The Lover’s Chair when it is said that Alderney girl Jacquine Le Mesurier fell in love with a squire far lower than herself in rank and they used this rocky bower for their clandestine meetings.
The text on the stamps ‘Forever in my heart’ and ‘From me to you’ is written both in English and in Aurignais (á jomais dàns m’n tchoeur and de mé à té) - the Alderney French Patois which Naftel’s wife would have been familiar with. The ancient local Norman dialect became extinct when the last known native speaker died in around 1960, although some traces of the language still exist in the Island’s place names.