We like to think of philately as a sophisticated and intellectual hobby. Little known, however, is the boost that stamp collecting got gratifying the interests and fantasies of adolescent boys. We live, today, in a world of pervasive nudity, but in the period of greatest philatelic interest (the 1930’s) there wasn’t even Playboy magazine.
In 1930, Spain issued a set of stamps commemorating the famous painter Francisco Goya. The story of why the set was issued in 1930, which was no obvious anniversary (Goya was born in 1746 and died in 1828) has never been told. Goya was a prolific painter and if you Google his artwork images you’ll see hundreds of paintings of which very few are nudes. But Goya had one famous painting, of which he did two versions - one called La Maja Vestida or the reclining beauty (where the model was fully clothed), and La Maja Desnuda, or the naked beauty. La Maja Desnuda was the first fully nude piece of artwork created in the Western world that had no pretense at representing mythological or allegorical women fully unclothed. La Maja Desnuda was just a beautiful picture of a beautiful nude.
The Spanish post office in 1930 was as attentive to the idea of selling stamps to collectors as any post office today. The Goya set includes several designs of Goya himself, but three values illustrate La Maja Desnuda. The stamps sold like hotcakes (if indeed hotcakes require several printings and inclusion in approval selections worldwide). The set continued to be enormously popular and was used as a premium by stamp dealers throughout the 1930s. Remember, 85 years ago print journalism was far more modest than it is today. Films had gotten racier (resulting in the Hays commission induced production code in 1934) and philately was staying one step ahead. By the late 1930s, moral standards had become stricter, and it is doubtful whether the Spanish post office would have issued these stamps at that time (especially so as by 1940 Spain was under fascist rule).
There are various kinds of history. Most of what we read is variations of political history - who succeeded who, and who promulgated what policies, and what was the resultant political outcome. In more recent years, social history - what people thought and how they lived - has become more popular. Social history is very hard to write as it is dependent on surviving documents and diaries and then is always subject to the suspicion that what has survived is not representative of what was really going on. The Goya Nude stamp set is a choice piece of social history. Literally millions of people bought The Nude Beauty when it was issued - especially the one peso and four peso value, both of which continue to be quite cheap even today as the Spanish Post Office issued millions. The interest in the set showed the demand for viewing nudes. As moral and censorship standards became looser, this interest in female nudity moved on to Playboy, nudity in the cinema and even the ubiquity of internet pornography. And you thought philately was a staid hobby. But we were there first!