Vintage Poster Archives
Buy War Bonds 1943 | Leon Kroll WW2 Home Front
Buy War Bonds 1943 | Leon Kroll WW2 Home Front
Couldn't load pickup availability
A young mother stands on a farmhouse porch, an infant held against her left shoulder, reading a letter. A girl in a pale yellow dress turns toward her; a boy sits on the steps with a black dog. Behind them, framed by the timber porch opening, a wide American rural landscape stretches to storm-lit mountains: ploughed fields, hedgerows, a farmstead, a river. The visual argument rests entirely on what is at stake, not on what is being asked.
Designed by Leon Kroll in 1943 and published by Abbott Laboratories as a contribution to the United States Treasury's Schools-At-War Program, the poster belongs to one of the most considered commercial art initiatives of the American home front. Kroll, a New York-born realist trained at the Art Students League and the Académie Julian in Paris, brought four decades of figurative and landscape authority to the commission. His participation placed this poster within a series that stands as a significant document of how American commercial and fine art institutions mobilised during World War Two.
The typography operates in two distinct registers: gold italic script set across the dark timber lintel reads 'To Keep Our Land Secure'; large condensed white block type across the base states 'BUY WAR BONDS'. The contrast between the intimate cursive above and the urgent sans-serif below holds the poster's emotional logic in a single reading.
Reproduced on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper using pigment-based archival inks. The design is from 1943; the print is freshly produced from a digitally restored source. Of particular interest to those drawn to American wartime graphic culture, WW2 home-front imagery, or the figurative realist tradition in American painting.
