Vintage Poster Archives
WW1 Liberty Bond 1917 | 2nd Liberty Loan Propaganda Poster
WW1 Liberty Bond 1917 | 2nd Liberty Loan Propaganda Poster
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A girl in a coral dress holds a small American flag; beside her, a boy in a white sailor suit extends his arm toward the viewer. No battlefield. No enemy. Two children standing in for their absent father, addressing anyone within reach of a government bond subscription form.
Designed by Charles Melville Dewey (1849-1937) and printed by T.F. Moore Co. of New York, this poster was issued by the United States Department of the Treasury for the Second Liberty Loan campaign of October 1917. Congress had authorised up to five billion dollars in bond sales just months after the US entered the war, and the Treasury coordinated a suite of posters across all twelve Federal Reserve districts to drive subscriptions. This design, numbered No. 6 in that series, is held today in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Princeton University Posters Collection, and the State Archives of North Carolina.
Dewey was known in his day as a tonalist landscape painter, a member of the National Academy of Design, his work exhibited from 1878 through to his death. The Liberty Loan commission sits apart from his usual output: here the soft modelling of his figures and the uncluttered cream ground are put to work not in a pastoral scene but in a wartime appeal of considerable directness. The composition's restraint is its argument. No rhetoric, no menace: just two children and a flag.
Reproduced from the archival source as a fine art print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based inks. The design is from 1917; the print is freshly produced.
