Unlike many great
engravers, who were encouraged into the craft by their artistic fathers, Jindra
Schmidt had an aunt to thank for pointing him in the right direction.
Born on 24 July 1897 in
Racice, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Schmidt had a
goldsmith for a father, but was orphaned at the tender age of three, and he and
his elder brother were raised by his uncle.
When he professed an
interest in becoming a painter, he was given no encouragement from his uncle, who thought that being an artist was a rather risky and
uncertain career path. It was better to learn a proper trade.
Fate, however, lend a
helping hand in the shape of an aunt from Vienna who, out of the blue,
descended onto the scene, listened to the wee boy’s desires, and decided he
should become an apprentice at her son-in-law’s shop, where the young Jindra
could learn to be a wood engraver. That way, he would learn a trade and be able
to be artistic at the same time.
And so, Schmidt came to
work in the Karel Kubelka workshop in Vinohrady, taking art classes in the
evening. Even then he must have been interested in stamps, because in 1918 he
created woodcut stamp designs for the newly founded country of Czechoslovakia,
surprisingly in a similar design as the eventual stamps by Mucha. That same
year, Schmidt managed to get a job at a printing and publishing house in
Prague. He stayed there until 1929, illustrating books with his woodcuts and
engravings.
He was subsequently
headhunted by the National Bank of Czechoslovakia, where he started engraving
banknotes. His work was so impressive that it is still
regarded as among the finest in the world. Highlights of his banknote
engravings are the portraits of Peter Brandl and Peter Parler on Bohemia and
Moravia banknotes of 1942.
Of
particular interest is his engraving of the Bohemia & Moravia 50 kronen
banknote of 1940. It features an allegory of Liberty, but the occupying forces
demanded that she be portrayed without her Liberty Cap. While Schmidt had no
option but to comply, he must have felt elated when he could re-engrave
Liberty’s portrait for a liberated Czechoslovakia banknote of 100 korun, issued
in 1945, this time proudly wearing her Liberty Cap.
He would remain with
the bank for 33 years, and outside his normal working hours he would eventually
become involved in stamp engraving as well.
His first piece of work
was for a small-format stamp in the 1942 definitive issue of the Bohemia &
Moravia Protectorate, after his homeland had been occupied by Germany during
World War II. However, there is some uncertainty
around his first stamp engravings.
Presentation sheets exist of the 1942
definitives for Bohemia and Moravia which include Schmidt’s signature. Pencil
annotations, although not by his own hand, state that the small format
stamps from that set were engraved by Schmidt, with the other values engraved
by Jaroslav Goldschmied. However, other sources state that Goldschmied
engraved the whole set.
What
confuses matters is that Schmidt and Goldschmied worked together on a number of
issues. Goldschmied did not design himself, so Schmidt was responsible for all
the keyline art, but the actual engravings were done by either man. Attributing
work to a specific engraver has never been clear-cut, and, as with Schmidt's
probable first stamps, sources often contradicted each other.
Having originally
signed his stamp artwork using his full name, he decided after the end of the
war to abbreviate this to ‘Jindra S.’ He later wrote that he had overheard some
casual remarks at the ministry about his and other engravers’ surnames,
suggesting that people might think that the Germans were still in charge of
Czechoslovakian stamp production.
It was in the post-war
years that Schmidt became part of what was perhaps the most powerful and
fruitful collaboration between a designer and an engraver in philatelic
history.
He became the favoured
engraver for Max Svabinsky, the well-known Czech artist, and professor at the
Academy of Arts in Prague, who was a prolific stamp designer.
They were close
colleagues, with Schmidt translating Svabinsky’s designs into beautiful steel
engravings again and again. They were also close personal friends, and every
interview one can find with Schmidt is one anecdote after another about his
work with Svabinsky.
Their mutual respect
was cemented at the very beginning of their partnership, when Svabinsky
produced a design promoting the 11th Sokol Congress in Prague in 1948,
featuring athletes paying homage to an allegory of the Republic, and asked for
it to be engraved and printed in recess.
The head of the
printing works thought this could not be done, but Svabinsky asked Schmidt to
try it anyway, and he managed to create
beautiful engraving, which was duly recess-printed.
The pair produced many
Czechoslovak stamp issues in the late 1940s, throughout the 1950s and into the
early 1960s. While Schmidt was always keen to reproduce Svabinsky’s designs as
faithfully as possible, there was an instance where he had to make more than a
minor change.
In 1957, when they were
preparing a set to honour the 17th-century Czech philosopher and educationalist
Jan Komensky (better known in the west as John Comenius), a misunderstanding
over the size of the portrait stamp meant that Schmidt found himself having to
add quite a few millimetres to the design, by lengthening Komensky’s coat. Svabinsky
didn’t notice this until Schmidt came clean about it. After initially branding
him a ‘rascal’, he subsequently expressed his approval.
One of the last issues
the two men worked on together was the ambitious Butterflies & Moths set of
1961. It was one of the first to be produced as a multicoloured printing, which
required the creation of separate plates for each ink colour.
Accurate colour
registration was of the utmost importance, and Svabinsky was apprehensive about
the project, but Schmidt was confident it could be done. They tried one stamp from the set, the 30h depicting the
Parnassius Apollo, Svabinsky’s favourite, first. As Schmidt had envisaged, it
worked out fine, and the set became an absolute beauty to behold.
Working on this
challenging set made Schmidt realise that he shouldn’t just be creating stamps
as a second job, but should make it his full-time occupation. On retiring from
the National Bank, that was exactly what he did, but no longer with his
long-term collaborator by his side, as by this time Svabinsky had passed away.
Even after
Svabinsky’s passing, the two would remain linked together. Svabinsky’s work
would still be featured on the odd stamp issue, and it would still be Schmidt
interpreting his work and turning it into stamp engravings. Out of respect for
the professor, Schmidt would sign these stamps with his full surname.
Back in the
1940s, on one of the very rare occasions that the two men did not see to eye,
Svabinsky had said to Schmidt he did not approve of the latter’s decision to
sign his work Jindra S. He argued that Schmidt had already made a name for
himself, a reputation which he could possibly jeopardise or at the least set
back, as people would have to realize the two signatories were one and the same
man. Besides, the history of Czechoslovakia was riddled with artists having
German surnames. How ridiculous would it be if we were to decide to change all
those.
But Schmidt
had been adamant even though Svabinsky kept trying to persuade him to change
his mind. And so, as a mark of honour, Schmidt signed those issues that
posthumously honoured Svabinsky’s work with his full name.
And he soon proved that
he could remain an important engraver even without his sidekick, producing many
more exquisite stamps for Czechoslovakia throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
You need only to look
at the result of the annual polls organised by the daily newspaper Mlada Fronta to see that his stamps
frequently featured among his country’s most popular.
He won the Most
Beautiful Stamp category for his 1969 engraving depicting a detail from a
16th-century mural of St Wenceslas, which was part of the annual Prague Castle
issue.
Schmidt would the
category again in 1971 for his ‘Paris Commune’ stamp and again in 1975 for his engraving
of the 60h value from the Folk Customs set.
In 1970, he was the
inaugural winner of the Engraver’s Best Interpretation of a Work of Art
category, for his painstaking reproduction of Banska Bystrica Market, a painting by Dominik Skutecky, as part of
the annual Art series.
He would win the same
award again in 1973, for his interpretation of his old friend Svabinsky’s
stained-glass window The Last Judgement,
and in 1976, for his depiction of Cyril Bouda’s painting Oleander Blossoms.
Mlada Fronta used to produce special brochures each
year, announcing the winners of their poll. These used to include special
souvenir sheets as well, with engravings based on the winning stamp designs,
produced by the engravers of those issues.
Naturally,
Schmidt has engraved three of these as well, coinciding with his wins in 1969,
1971 and 1975, and they form a visually interesting sideline to his collection
of stamps.
Even in his
later years, Schmidt would remain active as a stamp engraver, with four or five
issues appearing per year, until the - and his! - early 80s. Jindra Schmidt
passed away in Prague on 12 March 1984.
You will find Jindra Schmidt's database HERE.