Vintage Poster Archives
Buy War Bonds 1943 | Amos Sewell WW2 Poster
Buy War Bonds 1943 | Amos Sewell WW2 Poster
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A farmer's face fills the upper half of the composition, eyes cast upward toward an open sky. His hands hold the two registers of wartime sacrifice: a fanned sheaf of $100 war bonds in one, a miniature blue farm tractor in the other. Around him Sewell has assembled the whole vocabulary of American aspiration, two children in graduation robes, a daughter in a green dress, a red pickup truck, a red barn with a turning windmill. The message is precise and unambiguous: this is what the bonds buy.
Amos Sewell (1901–1983) brought to wartime illustration the same rural empathy he applied to his Saturday Evening Post covers, produced alongside Norman Rockwell through the 1940s. His instinct for working hands and agrarian life made him the natural choice for a U.S. Treasury campaign aimed squarely at rural America. This is Official U.S. Treasury Poster No. 999, printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office under document number 1943-O-522413.
The design sits in a longer tradition of American home-front communication: not the stark silhouette of a British Ministry of Information poster, nor the idealised worker of Soviet graphic design, but the concrete particularity of American family life rendered in warm illustrative colour. Sewell's farmer is not an archetype; he is a neighbour.
Reproduced from an archival source using pigment-based archival inks on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A considered addition to any collection focused on WW2 home-front design, mid-century American illustration, or the graphic history of wartime civilian mobilisation.
