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| Bedazzled / RISD Camouflage Blog |
About
a year ago, in a post called WWI Ship Camouflage Teams, we listed ten locations
around the country where there were teams of ship
camouflage artists, who had the responsibility (during World War I) of applying camouflage patterns
to ships. The seaports we cited were Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, New Orleans
and San Francisco. In addition, we embarked on an ongoing project of compiling the names of the artists who served in those districts.
The motivation for this came partly from having seen some of the 450 colored
lithographic camouflage plans (the diagrams used by the artists in painting
the ships in the harbors) that are housed in the Fleet Library at
the Rhode Island School of Design. The school was given this rare set of plans in 1919 by
artist Maurice L. Freedman (a student at RISD after the war), who had been the chief camoufleur of the district centered in Jacksonville FL. Above is a link to Bedazzled, the RISD dazzle camouflage blog, where some of
the plans have been posted online. Also available are high quality full-color prints of the plans, at actual size.
We’ve
since learned that there were eleven districts during WWI, not ten. The eleventh was called
the Gulf District, and included the Louisiana seaports of Beaumont, Orange and
Morgan City, and the Texas cities of Houston and Port Arthur. The chief
camoufleur of that district was an artist named Follette Isaacson, whose
wartime work was featured in a news article titled “Texans at Ports on Gulf
Baffled Enemy Subs by Camouflage: At Port Arthur, Beaumont, Houston and Orange
They Made Ships Look Like Something Else,” in the San Antonio Evening News,
January 31, 1919, pp. 1-3. The article was based on an interview with Isaacson
at the end of the war, when the censorship ban had been lifted.
