Netherlands stamps reflect Dutch connections with the U.S. and New York City

By Denise McCarty

A red, white and blue hot dog and a baseball jersey are pictured on new stamps from the Netherlands.

These stamps are part of an annual series highlighting connections between the Netherlands and another country, in this case the United States.

The six stamps issued Sept. 14 by the Netherlands PostNL feature connections in the areas of pop culture, language and architecture. Most of the designs relate to New York City, which was founded by Dutch settlers in 1624.

Dutch artist and writer Jan Cremer created the lithograph Hot Dog 1967 while living in New York City. The other stamp representing pop culture shows Kid Freeze by Jamel Shabazz, a photographer born in Brooklyn.

The baseball jersey appears to be for the New York Yankees, but it actually says “Jankees.” According to some sources, the word Yankees is derived from the Dutch first names Jan and Kees.

The design of the other language stamp pictures a fictional subway sign emphasizing the Dutch origins of a New York City neighborhood, Haarleem for Harlem, and borough, Breukelen for Brooklyn.

The two architecture stamps show photographs of the Hague City Hall and Central Library designed by American architect Richard Meier, and New York City’s High Line Park designed by the Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf.

The six stamps are se-tenant (side-by-side) in three panes, which differ in the order of the stamps and in the theme of the illustrations and text in the selvage below the stamps.

The pane featuring the architecture theme is shown nearby.

PostNL selected an American and Dutch team, Ryan Pescatore and Catelijne van Middelkoop of Strange Attractors Design, to design the stamps.

The pair reports that they created the designs to resemble billboards, with the vertical and horizontal lines in the background of each illustration representing highways of the United States.

Cartor SA, a security printer in France, printed the stamps by offset. The stamps are nondenominated with a large “1” followed by “international,” indicating that they pay the worldwide priority rate for letters weighing up to 20 grams.

Previous stamps in the series that PostNL calls the Netherlands and Beyond feature connections with Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles (Scott 1311-1313), Brazil (1339), Suriname (1373), South Africa (1392), Indonesia (1423), Belgium (1449), and Japan (1475).