Artist: Edmund M. Ashe
Artist Dates: 1867-1941
Signed Within Plate: Yes
Date of Work: 1917
Description: This poster depicts an American soldier, visibly injured, preparing to pitch an unpinned grenade into the German trenches. A cloud of smoke billows behind him and three German soldiers are visible in the trench. Above the soldier are the words "Lend the way they Fight" while below him is the encouragement: "Buy Bonds to your UTMOST."
Size: 41.0x27.12"
Weight: 1lbs 1.3oz
Provenance: Dr. David Orzeck
Condition: The poster is in extremely good condition with small tears along the bottom right. At the top center of the painted part of the poster is a minor loss about a quarter inch in diameter.
Artist Biography: Edmund Marion Ashe was born in New York City in 1867. His main claim to exhibition fame, is that he was one of the exhibitors at the history-making Armory Show* in New York City in 1913. He studied at the Art Students League* with John Warde Stinson. A painter, illustrator and teacher, Ashe created work that varied from serious and expressive realistic paintings of factories and the world of manufacturing and labor, to posters for World War I bond drives ("Lend the way they fight, buy bonds to your utmost"), and watercolors of the famous fashion ideal of 1900, the Gibson Girl. Ashe created a number of paintings of industry and the workmen who make it function: the making of steel with fiery open hearth furnaces, glass blowing and oil well drilling. Work, oil, 48 x 48, is a depiction of a tired, but lean and muscular laborer wearily following other workers heading to their jobs against the backdrop of a world become inhospitably industrialized.His The Cast, 83 x 72, shows the flow of white hot liquid steel channeled into a form, and is a nearly hallucinatory image of flame, shadow, blinding light, billowing smoke and the mysterious, looming dome of the furnace. This painting is one of three murals, along with Changing the Bit (oil drilling) and Changing the Shift (coal mining) that were commissioned in 1938 for the rotunda and central corridor of the Steidle Building, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, in University Park. The three images represented the industries of Pennsylvania: steel, coal, and petroleum. A photograph of Changing the Bit, and an article about the installation of the murals appeared in the October 15, 1939 issue of The New York Times. Harper's Magazine, Collier's, St Nicholas Magazine, and Scribner's Magazine published Ashe's drawings. He also illustrated books: In Camp with a Tin Soldier, by John Kendrick Bangs, in 1892; and Richard Harding Davis works, Her First Appearance, 1901, Ransom's Folly, 1902, and The Bar Sinister, 1903. Early in the century, Ashe combined teaching at the Art Students League* in New York with his role as artist-correspondent in Washington, D.C. at the White House. It is reported that he often scooped his rivals because of his friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt during the first ten years or so of the century. In 1920, Ashe moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1939, becoming Head of the Department of Painting and Design.Edmund Ashe was one of the founders of the Silvermine Artists* Guild, in Norwalk, Connecticut, as well as a member of the Society of Illustrators, and New York Watercolor Club.Ashe exhibited in New York in the early 1920s. In 1929, the Ferargil Galleries there exhibited his paintings of Cumberland Mountain people, about which a reviewer commented, "Possibly no finer record of the mountaineers has appeared than Mr. Ashe has created." In 1931, Ashe exhibited at the Carnegie Institute with other faculty there. In 1932, 1935 and 1939 he was chosen by the Carnegie Institute for their exhibitions of Pittsburgh artists. Ashe was also a regular exhibitor with the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh.After his retirement from the Carnegie Institute in 1939, Ashe went to Charleston, South Carolina before returning to his home in Westport, Connecticut, where he died in 1941.Posthumous exhibitions in which Edmund Ashe's work appeared include, in 1986, "American Illustration 1890-1925: Romance, Adventure & Suspense," Glebow Museum, Calgary, Canada; and, in 1998, "When Coal Was King: Paintings from the Steidle Collection," Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania.