1898 / 1902 PICTORIALS - Landscapes & Birds - In 1895, the New Zealand Post Office opened a competition for a new issue stating that the designs should show "New Zealand scenery or genre". The aim was to publicise New Zealand and, to ensure that they would be of high quality, they were to be recess printed rather than produced by the cheaper method of surface printing used in the first and second side-faces. They were issued in 1898 when to issue pictorial definitive stamps without the monarch's head was unusual.