1972 Stancraft NFL Posters by George Bartell

I came across a Baltimore Colts poster that was up for auction that I remember having as a kid which really took me back to the mid 1970s when I first started following pro football and I had this hanging up in my room:


I think I got this poster through the Scholastic Book Club at school. Seeing the poster again made me wonder what the other teams' posters looked like.

Fortunately the seller had a number of other teams up for auction as well, so let's take a look:






























These posters were done by artist George Bartell. On one of the posters we can see his signature


and on the bottom of the posters they are identified as the NFL Bartell Series with a 1972 copyright, and were manufactured by Stancraft:


The Illustrated NFL shows some of George's other football work:


As these posters demonstrate, George Bartell's art is full of motion, which is why he is probably more well known for his paintings of race cars



In researching George's work, I found that he even did some album cover artwork:


Turning back to George's football work, here is an ad from the October 9, 1972 issue of Sports Illustrated showing the posters:

In addition to posters for all the teams, there was a poster for the AFC


and another for the NFC


According to the order form, there is also a team helmets poster, which means a complete set consisted of 29 posters (26 teams + AFC + NFC + Helmets).

I'm glad that the seller had so many of these posters up for auction as I really enjoyed seeing George Bartell's artwork. Now I just have to track down pictures of the remaining teams to fully document the set.