The National Postage Museum in Washington, D.C., is one of a vast array of free museums in our nation’s capital that offer archival treasures documenting American history, art and culture.

Visitors to the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery can contemplate a dizzying array of U. S. postage stamps covering 200 years of our nation’s history.

The gallery, open since 2013, has no equal and the tens of thousands of stamps on view are cleverly grouped in pullout frames.

If that’s not enough, a quick search on one of the flatbed kiosks can bring even more stamps into the virtual light. On a recent visit we called up the Dimitri Tiomkin stamp issued in 1999.

In the “browse by topic or keyword” simply typing tiomkin brings the colorful specimen into view.

The nattily dressed Tiomkin’s gaze is fixed on the viewer, but with pencil in hand and paper at the ready, one is inclined to think he is contemplating the next notes to add to the music sketch.

Between 1993 and 1999, the Legends of American Music stamp series featured selected songwriters, classical composers, jazz musicians, and film composers.

This uncut sheet of stamps for the “Legends of American Music Series,” published by the U.S. Postal Service, features Tiomkin and five other major Hollywood composers. The stamp illustrations are by Drew Struzan and the design and graphics by Howard Paine. Dimitri Tiomkin joins Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman.

The Dimitri Tiomkin stamp is number 3340.