BIOGRAPHY: Pierre Forget

Pierre Forget was born on 5 December 1923 in Pontoise, France. His uncle Charles was a talented painter who encouraged the young Pierre rather vigorously to work on his artistic talents. Uncle Charles also had a helping hand in getting Pierre to attend the Ecole Estienne in 1938, where the stamp engraver René Cottet was his teacher. From the late 1950s until 1989, Pierre Forget himself would be a teacher at the Ecole Estienne, where he could count future stamp engravers such as Claude Jumelet, Claude Andréotto, Jacky Larrivière and  Yves Beaujard among his pupils. Forget would thoroughly enjoy preserving the art of engraving and passing it on to a younger generation.

Having left the Ecole Estienne in 1942 with his diploma, Forget soon got to work as an engraver and book illustrator. As an artist he painted and developed further into a graphic artist. This soon led to him becoming known as a comic strip artist, which was all the rage in France at that time.

But it was his former teacher Cottet who persuaded Forget to start engraving postage stamps. His first stamps were four designs for the Congo postage due set, which Forget engraved in 1960 and were issued in 1961. Forget’s first French stamp dates from 1968, when he engraved a stamp marking the fiftieth anniversary of the postal cheques service. This was actually a design by Cotrtet, who didn't have time to engrave the stamp!

In the career that followed, Forget was lauded many times for his artistic merit. In 1977, he won his first Grand prix de l’art philatélique, for his Fontenay Abbey stamp, part of the annual Tourist Publicity series  In 1979, his stamp for the International year of the Child, issued in French Polynesia, was pronounced 'the most beautiful in the world'. A year later, Forget won his second Grand prix de l’art philatélique, again for a stamp which was part of the annual Tourist Publicity series: the praying nun in front of St. Peter’s Abbey in Solesmes. Finally, his 1983 Pilâtre de Rozier stamp from the Ballooning Anniversaries set of Gabon won him the Prix de l'art philatélique for the African states.

Forget loved the challenge of designing and engraving stamps, especially of trying to create a sense of movement on a very small scale. He wasn't choosy when it came to subjects, saying he enjoyed creating his revolutionary figures on the 1989 Red Cross Fund stamps, which marked the bicentenary of the French Revolution as much as he enjoyed engraving his 1997 stamp celebrating the fresh fish merchants from Boulogne. That latter stamp is also a good example of how Forget liked to give his work a sense of movement.

Forget also liked the challenge of making engravings for the philatelic documents of stamps which were originally issued printed in, say, photogravure or lithography. Having to reinterpret the stamp design always got his artistic juices flowing. For the 1975 document accompanying France's Europa issue, Forget not only got to engrave the stamp images (which were originally printed in photogravure), but he also got to design and engrave the other illustrations on that document, making it one of the more interesting documents among the many bearing Forget's name.

Another 'peripheral' philatelic item which is worth mentioning is the engraving Forget did for a La Poste postcard of 1997, for which he engraved a beautiful Puss in Boots.

Forget was purist enough to lament the advance of computer technology in the creation of stamps, and he also lamented the deterioration of the quality of the ink colours, which led the work he and other engravers created down. Ironically, it was one of his stamps which became the first to make use of a combination of both recess and lithography: the 1991 French stamp marking the centenary of the School of Public Work.

Having been described as a discreet man, Forget nevertheless loved to come along on the many 'first day of issue' events around the country.

In 2004, Forget was interviewed on the occasion of a new French stamp issue, the Luçon Cathedral stamp, part of the annual Tourism series. From that interview it becomes clear that Forget was still just as enthusiastic about creating and engraving stamps then as when he was when he just started out in the early 1960s. He talked about how he loved the creative process of design, how he experimented with various views of the cathedral, how he tried to please both the Luçon people and the postal authorities, who had different views on how the cathedral should be depicted.

Forget's Luçon Cathedral stamp proved so popular in Luçon that they even named a street after him; a fitting tribute for what turned out to be Forget's final French stamp. Unfortunately, Pierre Forget did not make it to the official ceremony because he had just passed away, on 30 January 2005.

You will find Pierre Forget's database HERE.