The face he painted for the army was his own

The mechanism is the address: three words, second person, no name. 'I Want YOU for U.S. Army.' The image began as the cover of Leslie's Weekly on 6 July 1916, titled 'What Are You Doing for Preparedness?', while America argued about the war in Europe. When the country entered the war in April 1917 the copyright passed to the government, the caption changed to the three words, and the presses ran - more than four million copies printed in 1917 and 1918 alone, and the poster was pulled out again for the Second World War. The pose was borrowed from the British recruiting poster of Lord Kitchener, which pointed in the same direction; the figure was Uncle Sam, a personification with no biography and no private life to disappoint anybody. And the face was James Montgomery Flagg's own. He modelled it in a mirror, adding wrinkles and grey hair, and admitted the choice later when he presented a copy to President Roosevelt - he had been his own model, he said, to save the modelling fee. A poster is the one medium in this corpus where the second person is aimed at millions and received alone. One design, addressed to every man in the country, greeting each of them as an individual summons; there was never any way to write back, and none was expected, because the intended answer was the reader's body, in person, at a recruiting depot. Uncle Sam's eyes have been met by more people than any performer who lived in his own century, and under the hat is a commercial illustrator who saved himself the modelling fee.