The 30 Minute Rule begins September 24 at 7:00 PM EDT. An Initial Bid Must Be Placed By September 24 at 6:00 PM EDT To Participate After 6:00 PM EDT
UPDATE: Click here to view a more detailed list.
The group features works by many of the leading illustrators of the period, including James Montgomery Flagg, Joseph Pennell, Sidney H. Riesenberg, Henry Reuterdahl, Adolph Treidler, Frederick Coffay Yohn, Alice Hendee, Frances Adams Halstead, Burton Rice, Jessie Willcox Smith, Henry Patrick Raleigh, Charles Livingston Bull, Dan Sayre Groesbeck, George Mather Richards, and others. Individual posters range in size from approximately 26 x 18 inches to 41 x 43 inches.
The archive is led by five especially notable posters:
- James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want YOU for U.S. Army,” the defining American recruitment image of World War I, featuring Uncle Sam’s direct, commanding appeal to the viewer.
- Flagg’s “First in the Fight—Always Faithful,” a dramatic Marine Corps recruiting poster pairing the service’s historic motto with a forceful call to enlist.
- Flagg's “Boys and Girls! You Can Help Your Uncle Sam Win the War,” promoting War Savings Stamps.
- Charles Chambers’s “Il Cibo Vincerà la Guerra! [Food Will Win the War],” the Italian-language edition issued by the U.S. Food Administration to encourage immigrant communities to conserve food and support the Allied cause.
- Frederick Coffay Yohn’s “U.S. Marines—First to Fight in France for Freedom,” a large-format recruiting image celebrating the Marines’ prominent role in the American Expeditionary Forces.
The posters are applied to cardstock backings and in overall good to very good condition, with expected age-related handling wear, including scattered creasing, edge wear, small tears and losses, toning, and occasional surface soiling; Flagg's 'Uncle Sam' poster has a few strips of masking tape affixed at the top edge, and "That Liberty Shall Not Perish From the Earth" has losses to the top and bottom edges.
Accompanied by a numbered 36-entry document identifying each poster by title, attributed artist, dimensions, and condition notes, available online at RRAuction.com.
The mobilization of American visual culture during the First World War produced, in barely eighteen months, one of the most concentrated bursts of graphic design in the nation’s history. The Committee on Public Information, together with war-bond and relief organizations, commissioned the country’s leading illustrators—men and women trained in the golden age of magazine art—to translate the abstractions of war finance and sacrifice into images capable of persuading Americans to enlist, conserve resources, and contribute to the cause.
Through bold typography, heroic figures, emotional appeals, and striking symbolic imagery, these posters recruited servicemen, sold war bonds, and rallied support for military and humanitarian organizations. They remain a powerful visual record of the national propaganda campaign that followed the United States’ entry into World War I.
Assembled in the years immediately following the Armistice and retained within a single family for more than a century, the present collection offers a rare opportunity to acquire an unusually broad cross-section of the genre: thirty-six posters spanning its principal categories, from the war’s most iconic image to several designs seldom offered at public auction.
