The lark for May (1896) - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Iconic figure claim.
Define
A single figure, drawn, silhouetted, or posed, is the whole claim. You can read it across a street.
Mechanism
Compression into a body. The figure is not decoration. It is the sentence. Distance-legibility is the test.
Verdict
Poster scale, outdoor, packaging at a glance
Why it works
The composition splits one word of the title to each diagonal corner and hangs the figure between them, which drags the eye through the whole sheet on a single line rather than letting it stop at a headline. Leaving the body as unprinted paper inside heavy black contour makes the figure the brightest thing on a dark olive field with no extra ink - the same trick as the empty sky in the November sheet, applied to a body. The caption is banished outside the frame in small capitals, so the poster itself stays a picture and the identification never competes with it.
Steal this when
Use this when the piece has one figure and two or three words, and you want motion: split the line so the reader must travel corner to corner. It also works when the printing budget is two inks and you need the subject to glow without a third colour.