Guillaume Broux was born In Tongeren, in eastern Belgium near the Dutch border, on 24 January 1963. His father was a woodcarver who used to work on the famous classic Liège furniture. Broux took evening classes as a woodcarver as well, but his main training was as a weapon engraver in the City of Liège. I was also very good at drawing which is another requisite for entering this profession. Broux graduated in 1988, and spent the following year as a conscript in the Belgian army.
Soon after, the Belgian Post contacted Broux asking him whether he might be interested in engraving postage stamps. In those days, the Belgian Post did not have any engravers in their employ; they worked solely with freelance engravers. Broux took up the challenge and from 1989 spent the next six years working as a freelance engraver for them. The first stamp he ever engraved was the 1989 stamp depicting St Tillo’s Church in Izegem.
Broux's first stamps usually depicted buildings and other tourist scenes. In 1993, his depiction of Beveren won him the Grand Prix de la Philatélie, as awardwed every year in Belgium. He repeated that feat in 1998 for his Stamp day stamp, thereby becoming the last winner before the awards were discontinued.
On 16 January 1995, Broux, who at the time was the youngest of the freelance engravers, became fully employed by the Belgian Post. That happened because they had just built brand new printing premises on the south side of the city of Mechelen. Until then, they were housed in a small and old building in the city centre. As you find with many other state printers, they usually have one or more engravers in their employ, which has the advantage of them being available all the time during the printing process. So they asked Broux whether he would like to be fully employed by them, which Broux accepted. From that time on Broux has been the only engraver for bpost.
The very first engraving Broux made when he became employed by the Belgian Post back in 1995 was a souvenir sheet. At the time there was still the postal museum in Brussels, and both there and at the printers in Mechelen they sold souvenir sheetlets to visitors. The sheetlet at the printers depicted the WIFAG, an old printing press from just after the First World War, which is still on show at the premises. So when Broux showed up on his first day at work, he asked his boss: “What do you want me to do?” Whereupon the boss said “Why not make an engraving of the WIFAG press for our souvenir sheetlets?” The sheetlet was printed, by hand, in a very limited edition.
In all, Broux made some ten to twenty of such sheetlets. For the postal museum Broux made a sheetlet with the portrait of the very first curator of the museum, the famous philatelist André de Cock. In 2001, Broux engraved a souvenir sheetlet with a portrait of François de Tassis.
In 1996, Broux' first portrait stamps appeared: a set of four issued to mark various music and literature anniversaries. In 1998, a series of all the kings and queens of the Belgians was introduced, with all portraits engraved by Broux. A premium was raised to boost philatelic funds and the issues would coincide with the celebrations of 150 years of Belgian stamps. The whole thing started with the issue of two single stamps, portraying King Leopold III and King Baudouin I, and a miniature sheet portraying the contemporary king, Albert II. This pattern was repeated in 1999, but now with portraits of the three previous kings: Leopold I, Leopold II and Albert I. That same year, all six portrait stamps were put together on a single miniature sheet, which alluded to said stamp anniversary and to a stamp exhibition held in Brussels.
The same thing was then done for the king's spouses: three queens (Astrid, Fabiola and Paola) appeared in 2000, and three more (Louise-Marie, Marie-Henriette and Elisabeth) in 2001, again in a mix of sheet stamps and miniature sheets. These six ladies, too, got their own miniature sheet with all of them included. The Belgian Post also issued the engraved stamps from the miniature sheets as separate souvenir sheets, with each stamp reprinted in black.
It was Czeslaw Slania who taught Broux that, when engraving a portrait, every line should be functional and rational, with regard to direction and importance. When adding appropriate variations and subtle lighting, one can achieve great things
Broux is an enormous fan of Czeslaw Slania. He admires his work tremendously. Broux met Slania several times and even spent a few days with him as his ‘apprentice’, in Stockholm.
Broux considers Slania the last one of the older generation of classic Master Engravers. According to him, it’s not so much his engraving technique which makes Slania so unique, it’s the art of making the preliminary drawing. The composition of the lines of the drawing, that’s where Slania’s geniality shone through. When Broux visited him, Slania explained to him why lines run the way they do. Why he used a full line in some places, and a dotted line in others. Where lines had to be cross-hatched and when the little squares within these hatched lines had to be filled in with dots. How he used different lines for where skin was soft and skin was harder. Every line in the drawing was the result of a conscious and reasoned decision.
According to Broux, when researching portrait engraving, one immediately ends up at the American Bank Note Company, where a unique way of portrait engraving was developed. Every portrait was created based on a number of focus points: the cheekbones, the tip of the nose, the chin. From these, various lines departed which made up the remainder of the portrait. The splendid rendition of the characters was based on incredible soft transitional lines and the omitting of outlines. They're the perfect master class for any modern-day portrait engraver.
Despite Broux’ admiration for portrait engravings, he considers his best work to be the 2009 issue of Belgian World Heritage, a miniature sheet of five stamps. Quite unusually, he felt all five of them were perfect. While there’s usually some compromise on one or more stamps in a sheetlet, with this issue Broux was very happy with how they all turned out.
Broux only collaborated once with Buzin on his bird stamps. That was in 2005, when a Stamp Day stamp was created depicting the black stork. Buzin painted the stork and Broux executed the engraving. Other than that, Broux made the odd bpost souvenir sheetlet based on Buzin’s definitive bird stamps.
Broux talked about his engraving of the 2009 Postal Vans issue: Engraving a car or any other means of transport mainly means stressing the streamlining of the vehicle and the direction of movement of any moving parts or the whole vehicle itself. Looking at the 1950s Citroën van we find that the tires and wheel rims are a good example of where the primary lines follow the movement, without there being a need to use crosshatching to stress the rotation. The headlights are so distinct that they dictate their own line shapes. The front of the car is rather streamlined, so the lines follow the direction the wind would take when the vehicle would move. On the other hand, the front of the cargo space is not streamlined at all. A deep and forceful engraving with 90 degrees crosshatching enforces the feeling that the wind will buffet it. The door is neither streamlined nor does it have a special shape. But what is distinct is that it is slightly tilting. The lines accentuate this, with the light crosshatching symbolising the fact that the wind will not really encounter any resistance.
That postal van issue was the first in a short series of postal themes. The theme was continued in 2010 with a set of stamps depicting other postal transport means, such as trucks and trains. Then, in 2011, a set of five stamps was issued depicting letterboxes. Some of these are engraved by Martin Mörck. At the end of 2010 Broux had fallen off the roof of his home and broke his right arm, so he had to spend the next four months at home. He hadn’t completed his letterbox stamps yet, so Martin Mörck was asked to step in and finish the project.
In 2012, Broux' engraving of the Brussels market sheetlet won him first prize in the category 'Best Combination Stamp', awarded by the Government Postage Stamp Printers' Association (GPSPA).
In 2013, bpost computerised part of the recess-printing process. Now, the master die gets scanned, whereupon a computer, using that scan, guides a laser that cuts the engraving into the printing cylinder. The preliminary drawing is still done by hand. The engraving of the master die, too, is done by hand. Nothing is etched, everything is engraved with burins into steel. Broux’ first engravings which were transferred to cylinder that way were those for the 2013 issue marking the centenary of Belgium’s first air mail flight.
It is also an issue Broux is very proud of. He had to work with incredibly bad documentation. The photographs were so abominable that Broux had to reconstruct most parts of the plane himself on paper. The issue entailed a lot of extra work, but Broux thought the end result was very beautiful.
In 2014, a joint issue of Belgium and Portugal celebrated Andreas Vesalius, the 16th century anatomist. The five stamps in that miniature sheet were all based on engravings from Vesalius’ famous books De Humani Corporis Fabrica, depicting among others the blood circulation, the nervous system and the skeleton. The preliminary drawings for the engravings were based on those in that book, but the engraving on the actual stamps is Broux’ own work.
Among other issues Guillaume engraved in 2014 is the stamp issued to mark the fact that UNESCO granted world heritage site status to the Wallonian mines. The stamp is special in that this is an engraving in negative, whereby those parts are engraved which would normally not be engraved, so that the actual design shows up even though it is not engraved.
Another engraved issue for 2014 was the sheet celebrating the Grand Place in Antwerp. This was an international affair with the five stamps being engraved by five engravers from five countries, thereby bringing together five unique styles of engraving. Guillaume engraved the left-hand stamp in the bottom of the sheet. His style is described as classic realism. Using both lines and dots, it stands in stark contrast with the stamp engraved by the Swede Lars Sjööblom, for example, who engraved the stamp in the top left corner, using dots only. Guillaume’s favourite stamp in the sheet is that sitting se-tenant to his own, engraved by the team of Spanish engravers at the FNMT. He is especially taken with the way they engraved the windows, by not engraving the actual lines, but by leaving spaces blank and engraving around those.
The 2015 sheetlet illustrating the Bergen Market won second prize in the EU-wide competition for best engraved issue, sponsored by Bephila.
In 2016, Broux engraved Ghent City Hall for the Ghent Markets sheet. After having engraved various classical buildings for previous market towns sheets, it was quite a challenge for him to engrave such a modern building. It has a glass roof which is very sparkly; a feature which turned out to be rather complex to turn into a stamp engraving.
Broux' second engraving for Belgium in 2016 was for the airmail history issue, for which he engraved the stamp with the oldest plane featured on the sheetlet: a Brouckère 1911. The main challenge here was that there is usually very little available with regard to photographic archive material, making it hard to incldue all the details of a plane in an engraving.
Broux' final Belgian issue of 2016 was the Belgian Nobel Prize Winners sheet, which incorporates ten different portrait stamps. While Broux would normally work with a preliminary drawing made by himself, for this issue the designer, Thierry Mordant, made the drawings, with Broux giving a guiding hand.
You will find Guillaume Broux' database HERE.
Broux's first stamps usually depicted buildings and other tourist scenes. In 1993, his depiction of Beveren won him the Grand Prix de la Philatélie, as awardwed every year in Belgium. He repeated that feat in 1998 for his Stamp day stamp, thereby becoming the last winner before the awards were discontinued.
On 16 January 1995, Broux, who at the time was the youngest of the freelance engravers, became fully employed by the Belgian Post. That happened because they had just built brand new printing premises on the south side of the city of Mechelen. Until then, they were housed in a small and old building in the city centre. As you find with many other state printers, they usually have one or more engravers in their employ, which has the advantage of them being available all the time during the printing process. So they asked Broux whether he would like to be fully employed by them, which Broux accepted. From that time on Broux has been the only engraver for bpost.
The very first engraving Broux made when he became employed by the Belgian Post back in 1995 was a souvenir sheet. At the time there was still the postal museum in Brussels, and both there and at the printers in Mechelen they sold souvenir sheetlets to visitors. The sheetlet at the printers depicted the WIFAG, an old printing press from just after the First World War, which is still on show at the premises. So when Broux showed up on his first day at work, he asked his boss: “What do you want me to do?” Whereupon the boss said “Why not make an engraving of the WIFAG press for our souvenir sheetlets?” The sheetlet was printed, by hand, in a very limited edition.
In 1996, Broux' first portrait stamps appeared: a set of four issued to mark various music and literature anniversaries. In 1998, a series of all the kings and queens of the Belgians was introduced, with all portraits engraved by Broux. A premium was raised to boost philatelic funds and the issues would coincide with the celebrations of 150 years of Belgian stamps. The whole thing started with the issue of two single stamps, portraying King Leopold III and King Baudouin I, and a miniature sheet portraying the contemporary king, Albert II. This pattern was repeated in 1999, but now with portraits of the three previous kings: Leopold I, Leopold II and Albert I. That same year, all six portrait stamps were put together on a single miniature sheet, which alluded to said stamp anniversary and to a stamp exhibition held in Brussels.
The same thing was then done for the king's spouses: three queens (Astrid, Fabiola and Paola) appeared in 2000, and three more (Louise-Marie, Marie-Henriette and Elisabeth) in 2001, again in a mix of sheet stamps and miniature sheets. These six ladies, too, got their own miniature sheet with all of them included. The Belgian Post also issued the engraved stamps from the miniature sheets as separate souvenir sheets, with each stamp reprinted in black.
Broux considers Slania the last one of the older generation of classic Master Engravers. According to him, it’s not so much his engraving technique which makes Slania so unique, it’s the art of making the preliminary drawing. The composition of the lines of the drawing, that’s where Slania’s geniality shone through. When Broux visited him, Slania explained to him why lines run the way they do. Why he used a full line in some places, and a dotted line in others. Where lines had to be cross-hatched and when the little squares within these hatched lines had to be filled in with dots. How he used different lines for where skin was soft and skin was harder. Every line in the drawing was the result of a conscious and reasoned decision.
According to Broux, when researching portrait engraving, one immediately ends up at the American Bank Note Company, where a unique way of portrait engraving was developed. Every portrait was created based on a number of focus points: the cheekbones, the tip of the nose, the chin. From these, various lines departed which made up the remainder of the portrait. The splendid rendition of the characters was based on incredible soft transitional lines and the omitting of outlines. They're the perfect master class for any modern-day portrait engraver.
Broux only collaborated once with Buzin on his bird stamps. That was in 2005, when a Stamp Day stamp was created depicting the black stork. Buzin painted the stork and Broux executed the engraving. Other than that, Broux made the odd bpost souvenir sheetlet based on Buzin’s definitive bird stamps.
Broux talked about his engraving of the 2009 Postal Vans issue: Engraving a car or any other means of transport mainly means stressing the streamlining of the vehicle and the direction of movement of any moving parts or the whole vehicle itself. Looking at the 1950s Citroën van we find that the tires and wheel rims are a good example of where the primary lines follow the movement, without there being a need to use crosshatching to stress the rotation. The headlights are so distinct that they dictate their own line shapes. The front of the car is rather streamlined, so the lines follow the direction the wind would take when the vehicle would move. On the other hand, the front of the cargo space is not streamlined at all. A deep and forceful engraving with 90 degrees crosshatching enforces the feeling that the wind will buffet it. The door is neither streamlined nor does it have a special shape. But what is distinct is that it is slightly tilting. The lines accentuate this, with the light crosshatching symbolising the fact that the wind will not really encounter any resistance.
In 2012, Broux' engraving of the Brussels market sheetlet won him first prize in the category 'Best Combination Stamp', awarded by the Government Postage Stamp Printers' Association (GPSPA).
In 2013, bpost computerised part of the recess-printing process. Now, the master die gets scanned, whereupon a computer, using that scan, guides a laser that cuts the engraving into the printing cylinder. The preliminary drawing is still done by hand. The engraving of the master die, too, is done by hand. Nothing is etched, everything is engraved with burins into steel. Broux’ first engravings which were transferred to cylinder that way were those for the 2013 issue marking the centenary of Belgium’s first air mail flight.
It is also an issue Broux is very proud of. He had to work with incredibly bad documentation. The photographs were so abominable that Broux had to reconstruct most parts of the plane himself on paper. The issue entailed a lot of extra work, but Broux thought the end result was very beautiful.
Among other issues Guillaume engraved in 2014 is the stamp issued to mark the fact that UNESCO granted world heritage site status to the Wallonian mines. The stamp is special in that this is an engraving in negative, whereby those parts are engraved which would normally not be engraved, so that the actual design shows up even though it is not engraved.
Another engraved issue for 2014 was the sheet celebrating the Grand Place in Antwerp. This was an international affair with the five stamps being engraved by five engravers from five countries, thereby bringing together five unique styles of engraving. Guillaume engraved the left-hand stamp in the bottom of the sheet. His style is described as classic realism. Using both lines and dots, it stands in stark contrast with the stamp engraved by the Swede Lars Sjööblom, for example, who engraved the stamp in the top left corner, using dots only. Guillaume’s favourite stamp in the sheet is that sitting se-tenant to his own, engraved by the team of Spanish engravers at the FNMT. He is especially taken with the way they engraved the windows, by not engraving the actual lines, but by leaving spaces blank and engraving around those.
The 2015 sheetlet illustrating the Bergen Market won second prize in the EU-wide competition for best engraved issue, sponsored by Bephila.
Broux' second engraving for Belgium in 2016 was for the airmail history issue, for which he engraved the stamp with the oldest plane featured on the sheetlet: a Brouckère 1911. The main challenge here was that there is usually very little available with regard to photographic archive material, making it hard to incldue all the details of a plane in an engraving.
Broux' final Belgian issue of 2016 was the Belgian Nobel Prize Winners sheet, which incorporates ten different portrait stamps. While Broux would normally work with a preliminary drawing made by himself, for this issue the designer, Thierry Mordant, made the drawings, with Broux giving a guiding hand.
You will find Guillaume Broux' database HERE.