?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
PUT STRENGTH IN THE FINAL BLOW / BUY WAR BONDS. 1916. 601/2x40 inches. Avenue Press, London. Condition B: restored losses and overpainting along vertical and horizontal folds; restored losses, repaired tears and creases in margins. A vivid battle-front scene in tan, red and black, of a British Tommy bayoneting a German soldier. Acknowledging Brangwyn as one of the only artists to actually make his own lithographs, as opposed to artists who turned designs over to assistants to be put on stone, the Avenue Press refers to this as an "Auto-Lithograph." Despite the poster's unsettlingly realistic depiction (Rickards refers to it as "certainly one of the most vicious posters that the war produced" p. 14, and contemporary critics accused Brangwyn of "showing the seamy side of war," ibid.) it must have played very successfully on the British public's consciousness, as Brangwyn basically used the image twice; in its other variation the poster is in a horizontal format and extols Britons to "Back him Up - Buy War Bonds". As a tribute to his skill as a draughtsman, Rickards cites that in the middle of the war, the German poster magazine Das Plakat, gave Brangwyn the honor of a 7 page illustrated article on his war work! Rickards 67, IWM p. 61, Daracott 3, Borkan p. 206.
