Here's the story of the portrait behind Ruth Bader Ginsburg's postage stamp
As a Supreme Court justice with a large and devoted fan base, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a cultural and judicial phenomenon.
And now the influential justice will adorn cards, letters and packages: The U.S. Postal Service officially unveiled a new stamp featuring Ginsburg on Monday. The Forever stamps cost 66 cents each — or $13.20 for a sheet of 20.
The stamp’s oil-painting portrait is based on a photograph captured by Philip Bermingham, a well-known portrait photographer who also happened to be Ginsburg’s neighbor in the Watergate building.
Philip Bermingham
“It is such a powerful photograph,” Bermingham, who has photographed royalty and other luminaries, told NPR. “I wish I knew how I could replicate this on every session.”
On the day of the photo shoot, Ginsburg, who was then 84, hosted Bermingham and his daughter in her office at the Supreme Court, where a shelf of books sat on her desk. Other books stood at the ready on carts nearby.
Bermingham photographing Ginsburg at the Supreme Court. Photograph by Scarlett Bermingham.
Bermingham had long anticipated the session, but in the early going of the shoot, things didn’t seem to be working out. Finally, he decided the angles were all wrong — and the 6’4″ photographer realized he should get on the ground, to let his lens peer up at Ginsburg, who stood around 5 feet tall.
“So I got down on the floor and I got her to lean over me,” he said. “So I’m looking right up at her” — and Ginsburg’s eyes connected with the camera in a way they hadn’t in the rest of the session.
“It’s like you feel a presence in the photograph,” Bermingham said.
The two had frequently run into each other at the Kennedy Center, pursuing their mutual love of opera. And they had joked before about their height gap. Once, towering over Ginsburg in an elevator, Bermingham had laughingly said she looked petrified to see him.
But Ginsburg made sure to dispel that notion.
“I look up to you, but I’m not afraid of you,” she later wrote to him in a note.
Ginsburg’s stamp memorializes her quest for equal justice
The moment U.S. Postal Service art director Ethel Kessler saw Bermingham’s striking photo of Ginsburg, she knew it should be the reference for the late justice’s stamp.
“For me, this was the stamp project of a lifetime,” Kessler said in a statement to NPR, calling Ginsburg “a true pioneer for equal justice.”
The new stamp shows Ginsburg in her judicial robes, wearing her famous white beaded collar with an intricate geometric pattern that she said came from Cape Town, South Africa.
It was one of the justice’s favorite collars and jabots — and it’s a change from the more formal gold-colored piece she wore for her portrait photograph with Bermingham.
The Postal Service commissioned New Orleans artist Michael Deas for the stamp, asking him to create an oil painting that would deliver the timeless gravitas of a Supreme Court justice, and also capture Ginsburg’s intellect and character.
“Ultimately, it was the details that led to the stamp’s aura of grandeur and historical significance,” said Kessler, who designed the final product. “Resilient yet sublime.
Determined but accessible. It is truly… justice.”
The artist for the postage stamp is Michael J. Deas.
On Monday, October 2, 2023, the U.S. Postal Service issued a postage stamp featuring a portrait of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgthat was painted by New Orleans artist Michael Deas.
Deas’ portrait is both somber and warm. Against a shadowy background, Ginsburg seems to lean intimately toward the viewer, with a subtle smile rising at the corners of her lips and an unmistakable twinkle in her eyes.
In a Nov. 2022 interview, Deas said that the compelling tone of the painting was largely determined by a photograph by Philip Bermingham that he used as a model.
Though anyone sticking a Ginsburg stamp to an envelope will agree that Deas’ translation of the photo is marvelously poetic.
Master realist Michael Deas
The most time-consuming part of the painting, Deas said, was Ginsburg’s legendary “dissent” collar. The Supreme Court justice, who died in 2020, accessorized her robes with distinctive, decorative neckwear. She apparently saved the most striking designs to signal that she planned to disagree with the majority of her fellow justices.
Deas is a nationally renowned realist, who may be best known as the artist who painted the iconic lady with the torch Columbia Pictures logo.
The French Quarter-based master has produced the images for 25 postage stamps, including those depicting Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, James Dean, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Ann Porter, Stephen Vincent Benet, Thorton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Tennessee Williams.
Ginsburg, who died in September of 2020, is the first Supreme Court justice to get a solo U.S. stamp issue since 2003, when Thurgood Marshall was honored.
