"UNITED CHINA RELIEF": armed figures and a figure lying in reeds, under a sun-and-star device

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

Six figures, and a hand rising at the lower edge whose body is not visible, are stacked up the sheet against bare paper and strokes of reed or grass. At the top a bare-chested man in light shorts stands with his legs apart and sights along a long gun. Beside him a man stands upright in a dark jacket and a dark close-fitting helmet with goggles pushed onto his forehead; the material of the helmet is not determinable. His mouth is open and one arm is flung out; the helmet and goggles are what read as a flier, and nothing else on the sheet supports or contradicts that reading. Below and left, a figure in a dark tunic and dark brimmed headgear fires a rifle to the left. At the right a man in a conical straw hat, dark jacket, rolled trousers and bare feet crouches over a rifle laid across a bank. Three of the six hold rifles. Across the middle a figure lies in the reeds; at full resolution this passage is not legible enough to say whether the figure is dead, wounded or being moved, or what the injury is. At the lower left a man in a dark peaked cap shouts with his mouth wide open, and at the lower edge a bare hand reaches up out of the picture.

The only words on the sheet are the three across the top. In the upper right corner sits a device with no lettering: a dark chief carrying a white sun-like figure and a white five-pointed star, with three red vertical bars hanging below it. Nothing else on the sheet says who made it, who printed it, when, or what the viewer is to do — there is no appeal, no amount, no address and no instruction of any kind.

United China Relief was an American fundraising body, founded in New York in February 1941, that pooled the appeals of several existing China-aid committees and solicited money from the American public for relief in China. What this sheet does is put that name over a picture of fighting. The men shown are dressed differently from one another — a peaked cap, a conical straw hat and bare feet, a body stripped to shorts, a close-fitting helmet with goggles — and the picture stacks them one above another rather than grouping them; the archive records the arrangement without a source for how common it was in American wartime imagery. No insignia, unit marking or text on the sheet identifies any figure's status, service or nationality, and none of the figures is identifiable. The name of a relief organisation and an image of combatants are simply set on the same sheet, and the sheet itself supplies no connection between them.

One caution about this copy, and it is the reason this record withholds a date and a maker. The sheet carries no imprint, no signature and no credit line of any kind, the archive did not find this design in any institutional collection in the searches it ran, and several features of the image do not behave the way a printed design behaves. The hand at the lower edge has fused, malformed digits that do not resolve into a countable five. The standing figure's outstretched hand, at the right of the sheet, resolves into malformed, partly merged digits that do not read as a normal hand. The figure lying across the middle resolves into no coherent anatomy, limbs or ground plane at full resolution. Rifle barrels break and resume across the stroke texture. The three red bars of the device float free of any shield outline and end at three unequal lengths. The corners are rounded on every visible corner, the curve belonging to the paper itself. One uniform posterising treatment sits over the whole sheet, bare paper included. The archive has not examined the sheet in hand, cannot identify a printing process from a photograph, and records these observations rather than a verdict: this record does not assert that the object is a wartime United China Relief printing, and it does not assert that it is not.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

UNITED CHINA RELIEF

[Sole lettering on the sheet. Heavy condensed sans-serif capitals in dark blue-black, spanning the full width across the top.]

[Upper right, a device with no lettering: a dark navy chief, reading near-black in the photograph, charged at left with a white sun-like figure of about a dozen irregular points around a dark ring at its centre, and at right with a white five-pointed star; below the chief, three red vertical bars on white, their lower ends tapering and ending at three unequal lengths, with no shield outline enclosing them.]

[No other text appears on the sheet: no artist signature, publisher, printer or union imprint, no date, series or catalogue number, no slogan or caption, no stamp, cancellation or pencil annotation. All four edges, the band beneath the title and the illustration itself were cropped and read at full resolution. Small dark brush strokes in the grass at lower right could be taken for a monogram; at full resolution they read as painted reeds and shadow, not lettering — [illegible] if read as a mark.]

[No Chinese-character text appears on the object.]

Historical context

United China Relief, Inc. was founded as a membership corporation in the state and county of New York on 7 February 1941, bringing together several existing China-aid committees — the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, the Associated Boards for Christian Colleges in China, the China Emergency Relief Committee, the Church Committee for China Relief and the China Aid Council — to raise money for Chinese civilians affected by the war in China and to inform Americans about conditions there. Its opening campaign aimed at US$5,000,000, almost half of it for medical aid and the rest for what its own account called improvements in quality of life: training new leaders and caring for war-orphaned children. Its board included Pearl Buck and Henry Luce, and its promotional images were a series of full-colour posters, created by Martha Sawyers, that ran in newspapers and magazines and on billboards. The National War Fund, the joint financing body for American wartime appeals — the USO, the United Seamen's Service and about twenty overseas relief programmes — operated from 1943 to 1947, and the organisation appears in its table of agency disbursements, under the later name United Service to China, at $32,534,140.86. Several surviving United China Relief posters print the line "participating in National War Fund"; the year the organisation joined the fund, and how general that credit line was across its material, are not established here. The organisation was renamed United Service to China in 1947 according to the archival finding aids, though some accounts place the change in mid-1946.

What is not known

• Whether this sheet is a wartime printing or a later reproduction is not established, and the archive offers no verdict. Specific features of the image that a future examiner should weigh: the hand at the lower edge has fused, malformed digits that do not resolve into five; the standing figure's outstretched hand, at the right of the sheet, resolves into malformed, partly merged digits that do not read as a normal hand; the figure lying across the middle of the composition resolves into no coherent anatomy, limbs or ground plane at full resolution; rifle barrels break and resume across the stroke texture without continuous edges; the three red bars of the device float free of any shield outline and terminate at three unequal lengths; the corners are rounded on every visible corner, with the curve belonging to the paper itself; the title letters carry a soft raised halo rather than a flat ink edge; and one uniform posterising treatment sits over the entire sheet, including areas of bare paper. These are consistent with a machine-generated image printed on modern textured stock. The sheet has not been examined in hand and no printing process could be identified from the photograph.
• The artist is unknown. No signature appears anywhere on the sheet, and the archive did not match the design to any signed United China Relief poster in the collections it searched.
• No date, printer, publisher line, series number or National War Fund credit line appears on the object. The date range given rests only on the span during which the name United China Relief was in use, and the closing bound of that span is itself unfirm: the finding aids give 1947 for the rename, some accounts mid-1946.
• The archive did not locate this specific design in any institutional poster collection during its searches, so the design is not independently confirmed as a United China Relief issue beyond the name printed on it.
• The geographical attribution to New York rests on the same single thread as the date — the printed organisation name — and falls with it. If the sheet is a later reproduction, the place of issue is unknown.
• The device at upper right is not confirmed as an emblem of United China Relief; no source the archive consulted establishes any official United China Relief emblem. The white sun-like charge resembles the Kuomintang / Republic of China white sun, but it carries a dark ring at its centre and its points are irregular and not reliably countable at this resolution, so the archive records it as a description rather than an identification. Whether the red bars are to be read as American stripes is likewise a reading, not a sourced fact.
• The standing figure is read as a flier from the close-fitting helmet and goggles alone. Whether the figure is meant as a Chinese pilot, an American flying for China, or neither, is not determinable, and the archive does not attribute an intention to an unidentified maker.
• None of the figures is identified, and none is identifiable from the image. No insignia or marking distinguishes soldier from civilian; the differences in dress are all the evidence there is.
• Whether the figure lying across the middle of the composition is dead, wounded or being moved is not clear; that region of the image is illegible at full resolution.
• The sheet's dimensions were not measured and are unknown; no proportion is given.
• The verso was not photographed, so any stamp, label, pencil note or printer's mark on the back is unrecorded.
• The founding facts in historical_context (7 February 1941, the five constituent committees, the 1947 rename) are drawn from the search summaries of three finding aids — Princeton, the New York Public Library and SNAC — which agree with one another. The editor's attempt to open the Princeton finding aid returned a bot-verification page, so this record's dating anchor rests on catalogue summaries rather than on a page read in full.