The Sowers, Thomas Hart Benton's figure scattering skulls

The Sowers is a landscape-format poster of a painting by Thomas Hart Benton, catalogued at 1941, with no issuing body printed. A gaunt, bare-chested figure in a helmet strides over broken ground scattering skulls from a sack like seed, with a dead tree, a burning field and a red sky behind (NAID 513571).

Death as a crop

This page describes a painting of skulls, fire and a body in distress, as the archive's content note warns.

The picture runs wide, in landscape format. A thin, bare-chested figure in a helmet strides across broken ground, scattering skulls from a sack the way a farmer sows seed. Behind him a dead tree stands against a red sky, and a field burns. The only words are the title and the imprint lines.

The Sowers

[imprint: Painted by the Distinguished American Artist, Thomas Benton]

[imprint: LITHO. IN U.S.A.]

[signature: illegible]

Who is sowing

The sheet never says. The figure wears a helmet, but the record describes no insignia, and no caption names a country. The FRAME catalog reads it as a fear appeal about the enemy's war and gives the purpose as "Demonize." It is a fair reading, and still a reading: the image leaves the identification to the viewer.

That silence is part of its force. A slogan would argue. This picture only shows: war turns a field into a graveyard, and someone is doing the planting.

A painter, not an office

The imprint credits "the Distinguished American Artist, Thomas Benton," and calls the work a painting reproduced by lithograph. No sponsor, agency or campaign is printed. The archive types the issuer as mixed, and the National Archives holds the sheet in its World War II posters series; the rights line records it as a public-domain U.S. government work. The record gives no print run and no place of display.

The archive dates the sheet 1941, with no month. The anti-Nazi hub holds sheets that do name the enemy outright, and the Roosevelt administration essay sorts the period's posters by what they asked.