Vintage Poster Archives
Help Him Get Through 1943 | WW2 Propaganda Poster
Help Him Get Through 1943 | WW2 Propaganda Poster
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A US Army infantryman presses through dense Pacific jungle undergrowth, rifle and bayonet carried low across his body, dog tags visible against his open shirt. The M1 helmet is angled down, the face set in focused concentration. Around him: vines, ferns and broad-leaf tropical foliage rendered in deep olive, warm tan and forest shadow. Above, in cursive white script: Help him get through! Below, bold golden-yellow slab type fills the lower register: BUY WAR BONDS.
Painted by Henry Ernest Schnakenberg (1892–1970) and commissioned by Abbott Laboratories as a contribution to the US Treasury's Schools-at-War Program, 1943. Schnakenberg trained at the Art Students League under Kenneth Hayes Miller and John Sloan, and his work is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The naturalistic weight he brought from easel painting is evident here: this is not the flat graphic shorthand of many wartime posters, but a full oil-painting register applied to a propaganda brief. The Schools-at-War Program enrolled thirty million American schoolchildren as war bond sellers; Abbott Laboratories, supplier of medical products to US forces in both world wars, sponsored a series of commissioned artist paintings for the campaign.
The Pacific jungle setting distinguishes this design from the majority of 1943 American home-front posters, which tended toward European or generic battlefield subjects. The Solomon Islands, New Guinea and Guadalcanal campaigns were at their height at the time of publication, and the dense, claustrophobic vegetation situates the viewer in a specific and demanding theatre of the war.
This giclée reproduction is printed on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper using pigment-based archival inks. A considered piece for those drawn to WW2 home-front graphic history, mid-century American realist illustration, or the Abbott Laboratories wartime poster commission series.
