The WPA & the Golden Age · See America / The Parks
Save our wild life
Dorothy Waugh · National Park Service, 1935
What it is
A 1935 National Park Service poster designed by Dorothy Waugh, carrying the four-word appeal "Save our wild life" in the flat, silhouetted style of the New Deal park campaign.
Why it matters
Waugh was one of the designers who gave the National Park Service its visual voice in the 1930s, when the New Deal put federal money and federal artists behind the idea that the parks and their creatures were a public trust. This sheet is the argument made in poster form: not a landscape to visit but wildlife to protect, addressed to a passer-by rather than a subscriber. It belongs to the same government-poster moment that produced the See America series.
What to notice
Look at how the design carries on broad flat colour fields and a hard silhouette, with no shading to soften the shapes, so the whole thing reads at fifty paces.
A public wall asking the public to leave something alive.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Designer
- Dorothy Waugh
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- National Park Service, 1935
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LC-USZC4-8274; digital ID cph 3g08274
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. government program work (WPA Federal Art Project), any year. Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 18x24" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
