Vintage Poster Archives
Our Good Earth 1943 | John Steuart Curry WW2 Poster
Our Good Earth 1943 | John Steuart Curry WW2 Poster
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A monumental Kansas farmer stands in a wheat field, two children working the harvest at his sides. He holds a sheaf of grain in one hand; the other hangs at his side, fist closed. Clouds build behind him. Across a black lower banner: 'BUY WAR BONDS' in amber slab-serif capitals, and below it in white, 'Make Every Market Day BOND Day.' The argument is not fear. It is ownership.
Commissioned by the U.S. Treasury War Finance Division and painted by John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), this is one of the most considered works to come out of the American home-front campaign. Curry was the Kansas-born Regionalist who, alongside Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, brought rural American life into serious artistic discourse during the 1930s. When the Treasury approached him in 1941, he chose a positive image over an urgent one: not a soldier in peril but a farmer in possession, the land beneath him as reason enough to act. The poster was printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office under reference 1942-O-470156 / WSS 509 and issued nationally. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds an example in its permanent collection.
Curry's brushwork is expressive and painterly, with none of the flat graphic shorthand that characterises much WW2 poster output. The palette is warm amber and denim blue, the sky storm-lit rather than clear. The compositional debt to Jean-François Millet, an influence Curry absorbed during his 1926 European study year, is legible in the heroic scale of the agricultural figure and the two children arranged below him. As a home front poster, it occupies a distinct position: no urgency, no threat, only the quiet weight of something worth keeping.
Reproduced from an archival source on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. Produced for anyone drawn to WW2 home-front design, American Regionalism, or the political use of landscape in wartime communication.
