Enlist in the Navy

Description

Louis Raemaekers was a Dutch landscape and portrait painter who, in the years building up to the outbreak of World War I, exchanged his brush for a pencil and, through his political cartoons in the Amsterdam "Telegraaf," gained international fame as the conscious of the civilized world. The Germans tried to suppress his work claiming that his cartoons were "worth at least two Army Corps to the Allies," and the "Cologne Gazette" threatened, "after the war Germany will settle accounts with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of Raemaekers, she will demand payment with the interest due her." Raemaekers was even tried, and acquitted, of endangering the neutrality of Holland. In December 1916, he escaped to London where he was received by the Prime Minister. France bestowed on him the Cross of the Legion of Honor and he was given a reception at the Sorbonne, the highest intellectual honor possible.
Raemaekers worked tirelessly designing recruiting posters, as this poster, to stimulate thrift and industry, and posters for the Red Cross. His cartoons were collected in books which cost from four pence for the British popular edition to one hundred dollars for the American deluxe edition. There were millions of postcards of his cartoons, and actors and actresses reproduced them in tableaux. It is understandable that he has been compared to Callot and to Goya but perhaps the Boston Transcript" came closer to describing Raemaekers' role in the statement, "The mantle of Dante has fallen upon Raemaekers; he leads the conscience of the world to-day through an inferno of wrong."