The Weirdest Mercury Ad Ever Gets Weirder When You Realize How Much It Looks Like A Very Famous Painting

No one said advertising cars was easy, but at the same time, it’s not exactly rocket surgery. You would think that there would be some sort of rule, even an unwritten one, or perhaps a guideline of some sort that suggested, hey, maybe don’t try to sell a car with some kind of disaster, like a building collapsing or a sinkhole or a fire or anything like that. I mean, that seems kinda obvious, right? Not to Mercury.

In 1964, Mercury ran what may be one of the strangest print ads in car-selling history, one that involved a barn fire. And, even weirder, that ad seems to have a strange, even uncanny visual relationship to an extremely famous painting, the 1948 work Christina’s World by noted American painter Andrew Wyeth.

Seriously, look at this ad:

So, what exactly is going on here? There’s a fire, a barn fire, which I suppose is better than a house fire, but still no picnic. There’s a Ford fire truck on the scene in the background (I think it’s a Ford C-Series cabover truck) and then a pair of Mercurys up front, one with a fastback roof and one with a Breezeway roof, which I’ll talk about more in a minute here.

Let’s look at the copy for this ad:

I think it’s a pretty bold choice to call an uncontrolled barn fire “excitement,” but the ad copy does go on to clarify that it considers volunteer firemen to be “active, on-the-go people,” which is hard to argue with.

I guess I have to hand it to Mercury, though, for at least trying something different. Usually, in these midcentury ads, you see active on-the-go people driving their exciting cars to things like hot air balloon gatherings or beaches or nightclubs. Maybe it’s about damn time these advertising world on-the-go jackasses did something useful.

It’s such an ominous-looking image, though, that burning barn with its plumes of black smoke, and not one that necessarily makes me think I should go out and buy a Mercury. It more makes me want to make sure I unplugged that space heater in my basement.

But even more than that, this ad is tickling some visual part of my brain, creating a resonance with another famous image I know, one that I can’t ignore. Here, look for yourself:

That’s the Mercury ad on top, and below it, from 16 years earlier, is Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth. It’s widely considered one of the best-known and most important American paintings of the 20th century, and I swear it looks just like the Maine field that’s the location of Wyeth’s famous painting. It’s uncanny!

The woman in the painting, Anna Christina Olson, had a degenerative muscular disease that prevented her from walking, but she refused to use a wheelchair, preferring instead to crawl everywhere she needed to go, even outside on her family’s farm.

That Mercury ad is not the same place, but compositionally it’s just so damn close, I have to wonder if the people staging the photograph for that ad were thinking of the famous painting when they were framing everything up. But if so, why? Would a reference to a famous painting about a woman with a degenerative muscle disease help sell cars? In case a barn fire wasn’t enough?

Christina’s World is an incredibly powerful painting, for sure, so maybe some hint of it was enough.

The other interesting thing in this old ad has to do with the rear window of the black Mercury there, the one with the Breezeway roof. Mercury was very proud of that roof, and it was the subject of a number of ads:

The reverse-raked rear window – a feature shared on very few cars, including the Citroën Ami, Ford Anglia, and Toyota Will Vi – was touted as a great way to get ventilation even in the rain, since that window could actually roll down yet not permit rain to get in, allowing for flow-through ventilation, as this commercial shows:

I mean, it’s a great rear window setup. You don’t see cars advertised with a focus on their rear windows all that much. Or, for that matter, with a focus on barn fires.

Top graphic image: Ford