£1,650
Alfred Leete:
An Appeal to You, April 1915
_folio (ref: 5994)
Lithograph
Parliamentary Recruiting Committee,(PRC # 88) printed by Roberts & Leete, London
39 x 25 ins. (102 x 63 cm.)
Tags: Alfred Leete lithograph print war No Mans Land WW-1 Paintings Commemorating World War I
Provenance: Private collection
An Appeal to You original Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster No 88 printed by Roberts & Leete Ltd
Fifty-four million copies of some two hundred different posters were produced and distributed by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee over the course of the war. Millions more were produced by other wartime (often private) organizations. As one Londoner observed in January 1915: “Posters appealing to recruits are to be seen on every hoarding, in most shop windows, in omnibuses, tramcars, and commercial vans. The great base of Nelson’s pillar is covered with them.”
War posters were intended to be ephemeral and never meant to be archival or historical documents – as a result of this many are incredibly rare.. In the United Kingdom posters were distributed by professional agencies – in America the job of Bill Posting was left to the Scouts (who proved less effective), for which reason more copies of American (undistributed) posters have survived.
