Emprunt Nationale/The Equitable Trust Company of New-York
Artist
Guillaume Seignac
France, 1870 - 1924
Printer
Imp. Joseph Charles, Paris
France
Date1920
Dimensions47 x 30 1/2 in. (119.4 x 77.5 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LineGift of Peter A. Blatz
Object numberPH.124
DescriptionThis poster encourages French civilians to subscribe to the government’s national loan in 1920. This was the fifth such call to the public since the war began in 1914. After it ended in November 1918, tremendous resources were needed to fund the reconstruction of the country’s decimated land and economy. The Equitable Trust of New York, like other foreign banks with a Paris branch, was among the financial institutions that issued the bonds and promoted them with major poster campaigns. Guillaume Seignac was a classically trained painter who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; he was clearly well suited to depicting the kinds of allegorical subjects that characterized much French wartime propaganda. The allegory here also incorporates a degree of crude literalism: the figure of Columbia hands a box of gold coins, lettered “U.S.A.,” to a French farm girl holding a bundle of wheat. The poppies in her headdress commemorate the war dead.On View
Not on view
