Can Anyone Identify The Art Work On This Cover?

Is this printed or water color? Who did it?

It's printed. Note the Minkus imprint on the back side. Your answer is right there.

John beat me to it.

Thanks Guys! I must be going blind!

Took me a while to dig these up. This was a very popular cover, here used for FDCs:

I believe there are 12 total different designs.












Don

Don,

Minkus produced 52 different WWII patriotic covers, but those 12 started it off, produced in response to the announcement of the National Defense stamp of October 1940. According to Lawrence Sherman, those 52 covers were produced in the tens of thousands, making his covers the most numerous of all WWII patriotic covers. One of my interests is US Airmail, and there were two US Airmail stamps issued during WWII, both in the Transports series, the 6 cent red airmail in a booklet format in 1943, and the green 8 cent airmail in 1944. Besides the FDCs issued with cachets specifically created for those issues, lots of FDCs were produced for those issues using WWII patriotic covers. Here are two for thise war time airmail stamps using two ot the other Minkus covers you showed:

Basil

Hi Basil,
Thank you for the additional info.

Here is a Gimbles insert promoting these patriotic covers.
Front

Back

Inside

Don

So $1 got you 120 envelops with the Minkus cachets. I've seen people try to sell individual unused covers with WWII patriotic covers on ebay for $4-$5 each, though sometimes somone will offer several for that price. At $1 each, that would be 120x times more than they originally cost! Of course, everything was a lot less expensive back then, but that's still a big markup even considering general inflation.

Lawrence mentions Minkus marketing his covers through Gimbels, but I had never seen the promotional material before. Nice walk down memory lane. Thanks for sharing.

Very nice info. Thanks Guys! I don't collect cachet covers but this one caught my eye because they were Biplanes and we were in WW11 at the time or just ending.