Swiss stamps honor British writers

Swiss Post has released four stamps with an English literary connection as part of its series portraying Switzerland through the eyes of foreign artists.

According to SwissInfo.org, "British artist James Peel viewed Switzerland as a location that inspired some of the great works of English Romantic literature and composed four photographs that also reflected the unique seasonal passage of alpine water."

Peel, who now lives in New York but was resident artist at the Laurenz House Foundation in Basel in 2006, says there are two concepts behind the photographs, which he shot in black and white "because I wanted a sense of history".

"The first idea was of water flowing. Switzerland is a very fluid, liquid place; there's always a sense of a cycle. I wanted to get that idea across with snow in the mountains going down into a waterfall, then a river, then a lake and then obviously evaporating.

"A lot of my work is around ideas about Romanticism and places, history and memory," Peel told Swiss Info, explaining why he had focused on four 19th-century authors: Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lord Byron.

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