Lord Kitchener Wants You ("Your Country Needs You")

Why it works

The pointing finger every recruitment ad since has borrowed. Alfred Leete drew Lord Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War, glaring straight out of the cover of the weekly London Opinion on 5 September 1914 above the words "Your Country Needs You". Shortly afterwards the image was privately reprinted as a poster, "Britons [Kitchener] wants you", and its locked gaze and foreshortened hand made each passer-by personally answerable. It is studied as a lesson in compression: one face, one gesture, four words, at a time when official recruiting posters were often walls of type. Historians enjoy the twist that it was printed in modest numbers, seldom photographed on the streets and barely circulated beyond London, its fame growing after the war. Yet it was copied almost at once, from India to Canada to Germany and, most famously, in America's Uncle Sam. The Imperial War Museums calls it perhaps the most famous poster of the First World War.