Art Institute painting gets postage stamp treatment

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Being enshrined on a postage stamp is not what it used to be in the days when people would argue vigorously over which pop-culture figures were or were not appropriate for this quasi-governmental honor.

But we still pay attention, not because stamps are as integral to our lives as they once were, but because the U.S. Postal Service does a decent job highlighting interesting, occasionally overlooked, segments of our culture.

Thursday's new stamp announcement, made at the American Philatelic Society Stamp Show in Hartford, Conn., is for stamps commemorating four landscape paintings from Hudson River School artists.

The USPS, in its release, says the works celebrate New York state, but prominent among them is one owned by and on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Thomas Cole's "Distant View of Niagara Falls," from 1830, depicts exactly what the title promises in the art movement's characteristic style of finding high drama in natural vistas.

And now it's a Forever stamp, along with works by Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church and Thomas Moran.