Vintage Poster Archives
Bonds Buy Bombs 1943 | Grant Reynard WW2 Poster
Bonds Buy Bombs 1943 | Grant Reynard WW2 Poster
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A grinning US Army Air Corps pilot fills the centre of this 1943 ww2 poster, his right hand raised in a two-finger victory sign, his left gripping the buckle of a tan parachute harness. A brown leather flight jacket with sheepskin collar, goggles pushed back on the helmet, and the grey-green cylinders of bombs behind him: Reynard has placed the viewer close enough to read confidence on the pilot's face. 'LEND A HAND!' runs white across the top in condensed capitals. 'BONDS BUY BOMBS' sits below in wide cream-yellow slab-serif, the alliteration doing exactly the rhetorical work it was designed to do. At the upper right, the silhouette of a twin-engine aircraft against a steel-blue sky provides the only distance in an otherwise close composition.
Grant Reynard (1887–1968) was a Nebraska-born painter, etcher, and lithographer who had spent decades contributing illustrations to the Saturday Evening Post, Harper's Bazaar, and Collier's before the war reached him. His work is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Abbott Laboratories commissioned this design as part of the US Treasury's Schools-At-War Program, a wartime initiative that mobilised 200,000 schools and 30 million schoolchildren to sell war stamps and bonds, ultimately raising over two billion dollars. Abbott, a key penicillin supplier to Allied forces, recruited exhibiting painters and illustrators for the series rather than relying on commercial art studios, giving the posters an unusual weight for a mass-distribution item.
Reproduced from archival sources as a fine art print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based inks for long-term colour stability. A considered addition to any collection focused on the graphic design of American wartime communication, the WW2 home front, or mid-century illustration.
