Vintage Poster Archives
Come On! Liberty Bonds 1918 | Whitehead WW1 Poster
Come On! Liberty Bonds 1918 | Whitehead WW1 Poster
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A US doughboy in olive-drab uniform and Brodie helmet advances over the body of a fallen German soldier, a fixed bayonet held forward at waist height. The German's Pickelhaube lies at lower right. Whitehead renders the scene from a low angle and at close range, the soldier's face flushed and battle-scarred, the cream ground of the poster giving the figure no cover and no distance. 'Come On!' runs in bold black lettering above him; 'buy more LIBERTY BONDS' anchors the lower third in red.
Designed in 1918 by Walter Whitehead (1874–1956) for the United States Third Liberty Loan campaign and printed by Ketterlinus of Philadelphia. Whitehead studied under Howard Pyle and worked across magazine illustration and commercial art before bringing the figurative painterly approach of the Howard Pyle school to the wartime poster format. The result sits apart from the allegorical Liberty Bond posters of the same period: where contemporaries composed symbolic figures, Whitehead placed a soldier in the mud of the Western Front and pointed him directly at the viewer.
The poster is held at the Library of Congress (LC-USZC4-10653) and documented in Darracott 46, Paret 63, RAWLY 259, and Stanley 60, the four standard WW1 poster catalogues. It belongs to the Third Liberty Loan drive, which ran in April and May 1918 and raised approximately $4.2 billion, the most successful of the wartime drives.
Reproduced as a fine art archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper with pigment-based inks. A natural fit for anyone engaged with the graphic history of the First World War, the American illustrative tradition, or the wartime bond campaigns.
