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This dramatic poster was produced by the Donaldson Lithograph Company of Newport, Kentucky, one of the leading American firms specializing in theatrical advertising art in the early twentieth century. The design was created to promote a traveling stock melodrama loosely based on the life of Jesse James. Such shows were a mainstay of rural American entertainment before the rise of motion pictures, often combining pulp Western themes with overt moral spectacle.
The composition is pure theatrical excess. Flames engulf a frontier farmhouse as a Black maid, broom in hand, fends off attackers. A young man collapses in the foreground. At the center, Jesse James (identified by his crimson shirt and raised pistol) stands resolute. A boy has escaped hanging in the background.
Above the tableau, bold block lettering announces the play’s title: Jesse James, The Missouri Outlaw. The Sensational Western Life Drama. The typography, layout, and color palette are typical of Donaldson’s output in its golden period between 1900 and 1925, when the firm turned out thousands of large-format chromolithographed posters for circuses, vaudeville troupes, and tent repertory companies.
Though based on a real historical figure, the poster reflects little of Jesse James’s actual life as a Confederate partisan and bank robber. Instead, it draws from the highly fictionalized tradition of dime novels and frontier pageants, which transformed James into a mythic Western villain.
Posters like this were ephemeral, typically pasted on barns or depot fences and discarded after a show’s run.
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