Camouflage Artist | Harry Shenker

Cover illustration (1949) by Harry Shenker

As noted in the text below, WWI American camoufleur Harry Shenker worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for the Farm Credit Administration in the period following World War II. While functioning as art editor of that agency's in-house employee newsletter, called the Grapevine, he sometimes published his own cartoons, such as the cover illustration above from the July 29, 1949 issue.

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Harry Shenker was active/lived in Paris, New York City, Washington DC, Kansas City MO, and Hartford CT. He is known as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator and camouflage artist.

Harry Shenker was born May 8, 1888, in Vilna, Russia, in what is now Lithuania. His mother Sophia Frances Cabressky died while he was still an infant. His father, Jacob Shenker, immigrated to the US in 1891. He was a former commission merchant and real estate man, and was prominent in the Hebrew community in Hartford CT. Harry emigrated to the US in 1900 (at age twelve), and lived in Hartford with his father and his stepmother, Sophaia Shenker (whom Jacob had married in 1898).

Federal employment records indicate that Harry, soon after his arrival, while still a teenager, was living in Brooklyn NY (possibly with Jacob’s sister). He studied drawing in New York at the Art Students League in 1903-1905, and at the Art Students League in Hartford from 1905-1910.

While residing in Hartford, Shenker was a member of the Pickle Club, a social organization of older members of the Hartford Art League. In 1907 those members were identified as: Walter O. Eitel, C. Carney, Oscar Anderson, James Britton, Alfred J. Eaton, William H. Smith, Harry Schenker, Isaac H. Grant, Thomas Brabazon, Charles Noel Flagg, and James Goodwin McManus [1].

In 1910, when in his early twenties, he applied for a passport to study abroad for five years, at locations that included the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At that time, he spelled his name as “Schenker,” not “Shenker.” In the passport application, he describes himself as 5 feet 9 inches tall, with brown eyes, wide nose, a medium forehead and short chin. His complexion was dark brown, with brown hair and a roundish face. He returned to the US in May 1914, sailing from the port at La Havre, and soon after reapplied (by now, he spelled his name as “Shenker”) to return to France to study for two additional years.

Like many artists, Harry Shenker enjoyed painting along the coast of Brittany, in the vicinity of Locquirec, a strikingly beautiful village situated around a charming little harbor. According to Alain Levron (owner of the Loïc de Pors Melleca gallery), “Many painters, seduced by the beauty of this coast, put their easel there: [among them] Félix Valloton, Georges Rohner, Harry Shenker, Marius Borgeaud…” [2]. While painting there and at other locations in France, Shenker enjoyed a certain measure of success: On federal employment applications, he lists “$10,000” in annual income while working in that country as an ‘independent contractor and artist.”  

He was still living in France when World War I began in July of 1914. He remained in wartime Paris, but in 1917, the US also declared war against Germany, with France, England and Russia as allies. When the US entered the war, Shenker enlisted in the US Army in Paris, which was officially known at the time as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). No doubt because of his training as an artist, he was assigned to Company B of the 40th Engineers, known as the American Camouflage Section. It was headed by Captain Homer Saint-Gaudens, a theatre designer whose father was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the most famous sculptors of the time.

As confirmed by federal employment records (dated 1949), Shenker’s WWI army service began in August 1917 and ended in October 1919. He lists his position as “Sergeant, Master Engineer, Senior Grade, 40th Engineers” and adds that he “had supervision [of] over 2,000 workers in camouflage work in France for the US Army.” He describes himself as “a landscape artist,” and requests that he be assigned to “Art and camouflage work.” At the end of WWI, he received a service citation, and was honorably discharged on November 30, 1918.

In that same year, Harry Shenker married a French woman named Marcelle Marie Dalabardon (born in 1890), who was a portrait artist, sculptor and still-life painter. It appears that the artists-couple then settled in France, living on the Brittany Coast (her family lived in Bourg de Locquirec) and working out of their converted boathouse studio.

The certificate documenting the marriage of Shenker to Marcelle Dalabardon includes the signatures of several notable artists/sculptors, including Edward A. Minazzoli, a student of sculptor James Earl Frazier [3], architectural painter Albert Fossard, and Louis Biloul, a painter and art professor at the École des Beaux-Arts [4].  Also signing their marriage certificate was Captain Elwood Ray Keen, who commanded Company I of the WWI 40th Engineers Camouflage unit. Shenker was also a friend of John Storrs, sculpturer and painter who studied under Auguste Rodin [5][6].

In the fall of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, it is believed that the Shenkers were living at Marcelle’s parent’s home in Locquirec. Soon after, World War II began, with the Germans on the one side and the British and French on the other. Understandably apprehensive, it is also recalled that Harry and Marcelle burned and buried their lifetime works, and departed on a ship to the US on April 25, 1941. In the meantime, in Hartford, Harry’s father died on the following day.

The US declared war and joined the Allies in World War II only weeks after Harry’s return from France. He registered for the draft, but did not serve. Searching for work, he was fortunate to come to know two men named Verne Hemstreet (whose family he became close friends with) and B.F. Viehmann. Both men were managers for the Farm Credit Administration (FCA), a federal agency that began in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government reforms. Through the encouragement of these two acquaintances, Harry Shenker was hired to work for the FCA, and eventually held long-term positions as a graphic designer and illustrator for that agency.

Around 1948-1950, Shenker was identified as the Art Editor of a modestly-printed periodical called the Farm Credit Club Grapevine, which was an in-house newsletter for FCA employees. The cartoon drawings he produced for the Grapevine during those post-war years are lively and refreshing, and may be his most endearing work. Earlier, in the same newsletter, an account of his wartime experiences in Nazi-occupied France was published as a fascinating four-page article called "Life Under Nazi Domination." It is published in the November 18, 1942 issue [7].

While working for the same agency, Harry Shenker also offered an informal “art class” for FCA employees, and published various notes (called "Lessons in Modern Art") in the Grapevine.

Following the end of WWII, Marcelle Shenker traveled back and forth between the US and her parents’ home in Locquirec. She was concerned about its upkeep, as well as wanting to affirm its postwar ownership by her family. At the conclusion of a long career, Harry Shenker retired in 1965 (at age 77), and he and his wife returned to France. He lived for another thirteen years. When he died in Paris in 1979, the American Legion acquired his principal artworks [8].

Notes

[1] Memoirs of the Connecticut Art League, The Hartford Courant Magazine, Sunday April 19, 1948, by John A. Maher.

[2] Bretagne-grandeur-nature. Le Point. Revised 1/17/2007. Accessed at <http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-voyages/2007-01-17/bretagne-grandeur-nature/1088/0/36529>.

[3] The Arts of War and The Arts of Peace. Accessed at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arts_of_War_and_The_Arts_of_Peace>.

[4] Louis-François Biloul. Accessed at <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Fran%C3%A7ois_Biloul>.

[5] Archives of American Art, John Henry Bradley Storrs papers, Image name: storjohn00004.tif. Accessed at <https://edan.si.edu/slideshow/viewer/?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/storjohn/Box_0003/Folder_042>.

[6] John Bradley Storrs. Accessed at <https://www.askart.com/artist/John_Bradley_Storrs/29674/John_Bradley_Storrs.aspx>.

[7] Life Under Domination. S.U. Baxter. The Farm Credit Club Grapevine. 18 November 1942. Volume 1 Number 7. Accessed at <https://archive.org/details/CAT11083488007>.

[8] Harry Shenker à la galerie d'art. © Le Télégramme. 21 July 1998. Accessed at <<http://www.letelegramme.fr/ar/viewarticle1024.php?aaaammjj=19980721&article=4072056&type=ar#cbkkibaUAF7MKMUs.99>.

This biographical entry is comprised of information that was provided by Cathy Hyman of Blythewood SC. It is based on factual data found in various US government documents, in internet research and online newspaper archives, as well as the childhood recollections of the daughter of Verne Hemstreet, who, as a management executive at the Farm Credit Administration, befriended Harry Shenker and his wife Marcelle in the early 1940s and housed them during their most difficult times in Kansas City MO and Washington DC.

A slightly different version of this has also been provided to askART.com.

Camouflage Artist | Frank Overton Colbert

Frank Overton Colbert (1923)

Frank Overton Colbert was born at Riverside, in Oklahoma Indian Territory, on August 6, 1895. He is more commonly known as F. Overton Colbert, or, less often, as Frank Overton Redfeather Colbert. “Redfeather” is in reference to his Native American ancestry. His parents, Holmes Colbert (a Harvard graduate) and Ella Overton Colbert (educated in Europe), and earlier relatives were wealthy, prominent members of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. His maternal grandfather, Frank Overton, was a well-known politician, and one of his cousins was Captain Benjamin Colbert, whom Theodore Roosevelt had singled out, during the Spanish-American War, as one of the finest of the celebrated Rough Riders.

The Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples are historically closely related, which may account for Colbert being known as “Choc” while serving in the US Navy during World War I. According to the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, he was also known as “François” in France, where “He was one of the most curious figures of Paris’s Left Bank and was known as ‘the Redskin of Montparnasse.’” In another account of that Bohemian phase of his life, he is described as “a Redskin with all his feathers named Colbert.”

From an early age, Colbert hoped to become an artist, a choice that his father discouraged. As a compromise, he enrolled in the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he became a skilled mechanic. But at the end of that technical training, he was no less interested in art. His father withdrew his financial support, and Colbert left Oklahoma to explore the country on his own. He wandered westward, earning money by working intermittently at temporary jobs. Typically, he worked as a farm laborer, repaired machinery, and painted signs and posters. He also gave trick shooting exhibitions to paying audiences. Later, in newspaper stories, he claimed to be friends with Buffalo Bill, and it may have been during these wanderlust years that he became acquainted with that scout and Wild West showman.

Having reached Los Angeles after three months, Colbert set off for Alaska. It took him eight months (with extended pauses to earn money) to reach Seattle, from where he then sailed on to Nome by ship. From Alaska, he traveled by dog sled into Canada, near the Arctic Circle (where he painted the Northern Lights), then embarked on an arduous lengthy return, moving slowly south along the Pacific Coast again as far as South America, then across Panama into Mexico, and back to the US.

By 1917, while still in his early twenties, he ended up in Washington DC, where he became acquainted with a widely known Beaux-Arts painter and sculptor named Paul Wayland Bartlett. Earlier that year, Bartlett had co-founded a group of Washington artists called the American Camouflage Division. Bartlett was its chairman, while among the other members were Felix Mahoney, Michel Jacobs, Glen Brown, Richard Brooks, A.G. Smith, Alexis B. Many, and J. Crozier. The US had not yet entered the war, but it seemed inevitable, and it was this group’s plan to offer their artistic expertise in the development of wartime camouflage. At the same time, comparable groups had also been formed in New York City (called the New York Camouflage Society or American Camouflage) and San Francisco (American Camouflage Western Division).

At the time, as an art student at the city’s School of Fine Arts, Colbert was surely aware of this camouflage group, which had been featured prominently in The Washington Star and other newspapers. Soon after the US entered the war, Colbert enlisted in the navy, where, according to a news story—

His precise knowledge of color was of value to the camouflage department, and many of his designs were used in the disguising of transports.

This is confirmed by another news article at the end of the war, in the Durant Weekly News (Durant OK) on September 12, 1919. After two years of service, the article notes, he was being discharged with the rank of CCM (Chief Carpenter’s Mate). He had been assigned, it continues, to

 the work of camouflaging ships of the service so that they might be more difficult of recognition by the enemy submarines. He has been many times back and forth over the sea and first and last has seen service on every type of vessel afloat.

Following WWI, Colbert returned not to Washington DC, but moved instead to Greenwich Village in New York, where he lived in an apartment on Cornelia Street while studying art at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons School of Design). That apartment was infested with bedbugs, and (true or not) Colbert later recalled an incident in which he killed a large bedbug that crawled across his drawing board, by stabbing it with a pin. Elaborating on his colored drawing of the dead insect, he designed a textile pattern, which he sold “to one of the city’s largest silk houses” where it became “one of the season’s best sellers.” He later moved to Sheridan Square.

There was a major breakthrough in Colbert’s career as an artist in February 1921, when an exhibition of his work was held at the Montross Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York, a prominent gallery “where only the work of artists who have ‘arrived’ is permitted for exhibition.” Favorable if brief reviews were published in The Nation, The Arts, The New York Tribune and other publications. In addition, his work caught the attention of a New York journalist and art publicist named Holger Cahill. Newly hired to promote the Society of Independent Artists, Cahill believed that Colbert’s artwork exemplified an American brand of indigenous primitivism which he called Inje-Inje. As a consequence, Colbert began to produce what New York critics called Indian folklore pictures that represented aspects of Native American gods. Non-Indians need not be concerned about not understanding the images, advised one critic, because “the explanation appears beside the picture…”

The Trail to Happy Hunting Ground (1923), Frank Overton Colbert•

An additional factor that prompted Colbert to produce non-European Indian-influenced art may have been (as he recalled) a conversation with William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) that had taken place years earlier. “Red Feather,” Cody said to him, “you dip your brush in the rainbow and paint the Indian from the soul of all the generations of Indians, with the philosophy and precision of European thought.” He also advised: “In your art you belong to the poet with the painter’s eye for color and arrangement. You must be an Indian first and last, however well you become educated.”

As sales of Colbert’s work increased, he painted and exhibited in Paris and Florence as well as New York. According to a news article in the Durant Weekly News on December 15, 1922, he had been visiting Oklahoma for two weeks, but had to return to New York to open a new exhibition at the Montross Gallery. By mid-January, he “will sail to Paris, to continue his artwork in his studio there, as well as another studio in Florence.” Having spent time in earlier years in those two cities, it claims, he “is already a splendid conversationalist in both the French and Italian languages.”

It was apparently during his European episodes that he became a familiar oddity in the cafes and nightclubs of Montparnasse, where he could be seen drawing on site in pastels on thick, yellow sheets of butcher paper. He was especially noticed because he would be wearing a full Native American wardrobe, with an elaborate headdress.

He sometimes also dressed this way when he was in New York. We know this because of a story about his association with American author Mary Hunter Austin. On January 8, 1922, the National Arts Club in New York gathered for a banquet in honor of Austin’s achievements as a writer. As honored guest, Austin could choose to dress as she pleased. And she did: in honor of the American Southwest, she arrived in an outlandish Spanish-like dress that made her appear, as one critic said, to be wrapped in the flag of New Mexico. As a further indiscretion, her escort for the evening was none other than Frank Overton Colbert, who was dressed in buckskin Indian garb, with a headdress of flamingo feathers. His outfit included a necklace strung with nasty-looking teeth. When a socialite at the gathering asked what kind of animal’s teeth they were, Colbert answered “Alligator.” “Oh, how awful,” the woman exclaimed, and then politely added, “But I suppose you see it as the same as a pearl necklace.” To which Colbert responded, “No, not at all—any fool can take a pearl away from an oyster.”

We know that Colbert married, but all but nothing is known of his wife, who went with him to Paris in 1923. Her name was Kate Landon Colbert, and she was born in 1899, but we do not know how or when she died. Nor do we know where she is buried. They had one child, a son named Robert Holmes Colbert, who was born in 1926 in France and died at the age of 50 in 1976.

We also know that Colbert did not do entirely well in Europe. True, his work was chosen for the Salon d’Automne in 1923, and for the Salon des Indépendants in 1926. But it appears he succumbed to depression, and it became necessary to move back to the US (presumably with his wife and son). It is unclear where he settled after returning to the US, but he may have been living in Colorado, because at least one source reports that he was hospitalized in that state in 1941 because of mental illness.

Whatever the tragic circumstances, he died on March 20, 1953, and is buried in a military cemetery at Fort Lyons CO.

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• Painting reproduced above is courtesy of Steven S. Powers. 

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SOURCES
Colbert, François Overton Redfeather. Benezit Dictionary of Artists (2006).
FAMOUS ARTIST HERE PRIOR TO TRIP TO EUROPE. Durant Weekly News (Durant OK),  December 15, 1922, p. 7.
Franck, D. Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigilani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
INDIAN ARTIST IS EARNING HIS WAY FROM CITY TO CITY. Los Angeles Herald. September 30, 1915.
INDIAN ARTIST IS VISITOR IN BISBEE. Overton Colbert of Famous Oklahoma Family Is Making Tour of Country. Bisbee Daily Review (Bisbee AZ). September 19, 1915, p. 6.
INDIAN ARTIST ON WARPATH. Remarkable Story of Oklahoma Born Genius on Road to Fame. WAS AIDED BY CODY. Civilization and Savagery in Struggle for Mastery of Colbert’s Nature. Tulsa Daily World (Tulsa OK) March 13, 1921, Sec A Page 9—
INDIAN ARTIST'S WORK HERE. F. Overton Arrives With His Paintings. Tulsa Daily World. October 28, 1922, p. 5.
Loving, P. "Art: An American Painter" in The Nation. January 26, 1921, p. 125.
Moore, A.W. Holger Cahill's Inje-Inje: The Story of a Modern Primitivism. Online. 
Saw Much Water Service. Durant Weekly News (Durant OK),  September 12, 1919, p. 4. 
Some Current Art Shows in the Local Galleries. New York Tribune. December 4, 1921, p. 1B. 

Note: There is a newspaper photograph (poorly printed) of Colbert, dressed in a feathered headdress and other Native American attire, in the World’s News (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), February 16, 1924, p. 4. The headline reads IMMORTALIZING THE ARTS OF HIS FATHERS, with a caption beneath the photo that claims that he is “François Overton Colbert, the last chief [sic] of the Chickasaw Indians, of Oklahoma, known to his people as Red Feather, now in Paris, where he is at work upon a series of canvases painted in the Indian manner.” 

A slightly different version of this biographical entry has also been contributed to askART.com.

Signed copies still available

Camouflage Artist | I.B. Hazelton

Recruiting Poster (1914) by I.B. Hazelton

Isaac Brewster Hazelton (known professionally as I.B. Hazelton) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 30, 1875. At age three, his family moved to Wellesley, where, in 1889, he graduated from Wellesley High School. That same year, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied Engineering, Draftsmanship and Art. He graduated from MIT in 1894.

Hazelton’s father was a prominent physician named Isaac Hills Hazelton, who served during the Civil War as Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Navy, and, subsequently, as a doctor at two asylums for the insane, in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. There were three daughters in the family, one of whom was Mary Brewster Hazelton, who became an accomplished portrait painter. The extensive family papers, known as the Hazelton Family Collection, are housed in the Wellesley Historical Society in Wellesley MA.

Throughout his life, I.B. Hazelton was a prolific illustrator, specializing in illustrations for advertisements, pulp magazines and books. After marrying in 1906, he and his wife moved to Providence, where he taught for several years at the Rhode Island School of Design.

In 1912, they settled in New York, where he worked for a publishing firm, while also concurrently working as a freelance illustrator. World War I began in Europe in 1914, and, although the US did not enter the war until 1917, Hazelton began to look for ways to contribute to the war effort.

According to David Saunders, in a biographical essay on the website for Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists, Hazelton designed a popular army recruiting poster (Men Wanted for the Army) in 1914, as is reproduced above. Saunders adds that later—

On September 12, 1918, he registered wth the draft board and was recorded to be of medium height, medium build, with gray eyes and brown hair. He was forty-four, married and the father of a child, so he was not selected for military service.

Denied the option of active service, Hazelton studied ship camouflage in 1918 with muralist and camouflage artist William Andrew Mackay (as proven by a letter signed by Hazelton and other associates of Mackay on September 25, 1918). For the remainder of the war, he worked in New York (as noted in a listing of the civilian wartime service of MIT graduates) as a

Marine Camoufleur, N.Y. District, U.S. Shipping Board, superintending painting of camouflage designs on ships, and research on the subject of camouflage.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hazelton pursued his work as an illustrator for newspapers, books and magazines. At age 73, while commuting to his Jersey City home from his Manhattan studio, he died of a heart attack on January 27, 1943.

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Note A slightly different version of this biographical entry has also been contributed to askART.com.

Camouflage Artist | Ivan Opffer

Homer St-Gaudens (c1918) by Ivan Opffer

Ivan Opffer was born in Nyborg, Denmark, on June 4, 1897, to a family of Danish scholars and journalists. His brother was Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant seaman and journalist who was known for his relationship with American writer Hart Crane.

Ivan was raised in Mexico City and New York, where his anarchist father was the editor of a radical Danish-language newspaper. His involvement in painting and drawing began at an early age. At a summer workshop, he met and studied drawing with Winslow Homer, then went on to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York.

When the US entered World War I, Opffer was one of the members of the American Army Camouflage Corps, headed by Homer Saint-Gaudens (whose mother was a relative of Winslow Homer), the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As a camoufleur, Opffer served with other artists and architects, some of whom became well-known, including Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, Kimon Nicolaides, Robert Lawson, Abraham Rattner, Kerr Eby and others. It was this same unit, while still in training in at Camp American University in Washington DC, that launched a camp newspaper called The Camoufleur. Only three issues were published before the unit’s deployment to France in late 1917. In the October 31 issue, a satirical portrait by Opffer of Homer Saint-Gaudens (titled “Our Boss”) was published on page 5 (as reproduced above).

After the war, Opffer returned to New York, where he became known for his caricatures of leading Modern writers, among them James Joyce, Edgar Lee Masters, Siegfried Sassoon, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sandburg, G.K. Chesterton, and Thomas Mann.

In the years between the wars, Opffer married Betty à Beckett Chomley, and settled in Paris, where he was a student at the Academie Julian. He also lived in London and Copenhagen, where his drawings were frequently published in newspapers and magazines. With the outbreak of World War II, he and his family returned to New York and lived in Greenwich Village. Among his friends in that era were William Butler Yeats, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Ernest Hemingway. He and his wife Betty are said to be portrayed in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

When he retired in the 1960s, Opffer moved back to Copenhagen, where he died on March 3, 1980.

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This account is partly based on an online information page that was written by Ivan Opffer’s granddaughter, Yvonne Opffer Conybeare. Accessed on January 17, 2018 at <http://www.oocities.org/yconybeare/>.

A slightly different version of this biographical note has also been contributed to askART.com.

Camouflage Artist | Frank H. Schwarz

Oregon Statehouse Rotunda (1938) Frank H. Schwarz

Frank Henry Schwarz was born in New York City on June 21, 1894, but his family moved to Chicago, where he eventually studied at the Chicago Art Institute. He survived by working as a bus boy in a restaurant, while his father returned to New York, where he worked as a waiter.

During World War I, Schwarz joined the American Army Camouflage Corps, where he served with other artists, among them Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, and Robert Lawson. He remained with that unit in France, until, at the war’s end, he was stricken by pneumonia. While regaining his health, he settled in New York, where he set up a painting studio in Greenwich Village (as did several others from the same camouflage unit).

In the summer of 1921, Schwarz was featured in an article in The New York Times, titled PAINTER FACING EVICTION WHEN PAINTING WINS PRIX DE ROME. The article reported that, at age twenty-six and penniless, Schwarz had been only minutes away from being evicted from his NYC two-room studio when, to his surprise, a letter arrived telling him that he had won the Prix de Rome, among the most coveted prizes in art. In the weeks that followed, his success was featured nationwide in various newspapers. The painting for which he won the award was A Tribute to Heroism.

In 1926, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Three years later, one of his works was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum.

Among his most enduring works are a number of murals, commissioned for architectural sites. He may have turned to murals as a result of his wartime connection to fellow camoufleur and muralist Barry Faulkner. In 1938, Schwarz and Faulkner were among the primary muralists for the Oregon State Capitol in Salem. It was Schwarz who painted two large murals for the building’s rotunda, the dome interior, and a mural in the Senate chamber. Later, Schwarz completed mural commissions for other buildings in the US and Canada.

He died on September 5, 1951, in Mount Vernon, New York.

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Faulkner, Barry, and Frank H. Schwarz. “Three Murals in the Capitol.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 41: 2 (June, 1940), 132-136.

Note  A slightly different version of this biographical note has also been contributed to askART.com.

Camouflage Artist | More on Oswald Moser

The Dwarf (1920) by Oswald Moser (self-portrait on left)

Oswald Moser (his full name at birth was Robert Oswald Moser) was born in London in 1874. His training as an artist began in the same city at St John’s Wood Art School (called The Wood). He began to exhibit professionally in 1904, and enjoyed success in subsequent years, including an Honorable Mention (1907) and a Silver Medal (1922) at the Paris Salon. A writer as well as an artist, he sometimes illustrated his own stories.

During World War I, he served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, during which he contributed to the development of disruptive ship camouflage (called “dazzle-painting”). Moser was one of the artists who worked in the camouflage section headed by British marine painter Norman Wilkinson at Burlington House (Royal College of Art), beginning in November 1917.

There is a photograph of Moser, seated beside a dazzle-painted ship model of a British ocean liner, the RMS Olympic. It can be accessed on the website of the [US] Navy History and Heritage Command (NH 120779), where the caption mistakenly claims that he was “head of British dazzle painting and camouflage for ships.”  It is also reproduced on page 38 of James Taylor’s book about dazzle camouflage (2016), as well as in an earlier post on this blog.

Moser’s wife, Mary Louise (Murray) Moser, was also associated with that wartime camouflage unit. Indeed, there is a well-known photograph of the testing theatre at Burlington House (reproduced below) in which, I am told, the man looking through the periscope on the right is Oswald Moser, while his wife is the woman on the opposite side.

British ship camouflage testing theatre

It may not be undue to say that Moser’s paintings are sometimes odd and fantasy-based. Of particular distinction are a painting titled Wounded Sailors Listening to Musicians Playing on Board a Ship (c1918), another titled The Dwarf: Scenes from the Tales of Richoux (1920, as shown at the top of this page), which includes a strange self-portrait, and a more straightforward Self-Portrait (1938), that is now in the collection of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth.

There was some public controversy about one of his paintings, titled The Lord of Creation (1937). When exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Annual Exhibition, some people saw it as indecently referring to King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the throne in order to marry American socialite Wallis Simpson (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor).  Although Moser denied the connection, the painting was removed from the exhibition.

He continued to exhibit until the early 1940s. He died in 1953.

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Sources
Taylor, James. Dazzle: disguise and disruption in war and art. UK: Pool of London Press, 2016.
Williams, David. Liners in battledress. St. Catharines, Ontario: Vanwell Publishing Ltd, 1989.

Note A slightly different version of this biographical note has also been contributed to askART.com. 

copies still available

Camouflage Artist | Cecil George Charles King

WWI camouflage ships (1918) Cecil George Charles King

Above Watercolor painting by Cecil George Charles King (1918), showing two dazzle-painted merchant ships (one in conspicuous zebra stripes) at dockside in Leith. Scotland. This and other images, with additional text and links, can be found on the 14-18-NOW WWI Centenary Art Commissions webpage. Starting this season (2018), in marking the final year of the centenary, that organization will be hosting dazzle-themed events in New York.

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Cecil George Charles King (not to be confused with an Irish artist named Cecil King) was born in the London Borough of Hounslow on August 6, 1881. He initially studied engineering, but in a change of profession, he chose to study art instead in London at the  Westminster School of Art. He also studied in Paris, where he worked with Jean-Paul Laurens and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.

In 1917, when British painter Norman Wilkinson was sanctioned by the government to set up at Burlington House (Royal College of Art) a wartime “dazzle-painting” team for ship camouflage, King was “Wilkinson’s right-hand man.” This was in part, as James Taylor (2016) explains, because King “was a long-standing friend with shared interests in maritime subjects and poster designs which promoted travel by rail and ship.” He joined the camouflage section on August 18, 1917, and remained there for the rest of the war. 

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King appears briefly in a news article by Mordaunt Hall (byline of British-born journalist Frederick Wentworth Mordaunt Hall, who had been an advance man for Buffalo Bill's Wild West, spied for England in World War I, and later became the first film critic for the New York Times), titled THE SILK HATTED MAN OF THE GEORGE WASHINGTON, in the New York Herald (March 2, 1919)—

Lieutenant Cecil King, RNVR, one of the men who have accomplished great things as a "dazzle painter" of ships, started the story ball rolling with:

"A young English cadet was ordered to come before an admiral who, as the youngsters put it in the royal navy, wanted to look into his eyeballs. 'Name three great English admirals,' said the examining admiral in loud tones. The cadet, sitting on the corner of a chair that might have held three his size, was perhaps not exactly at ease in such august presence.

'Drake, sir,' he began.

'Very good,' thundered the Admiral. 'Now another?'

'Nelson, sir.'

'Very good, and the third?'

The cadet moved forward on his chair and then piped:

'I didn't quite catch your name, sir.'"

We were all laughing when who should come through our compartment but [American] Admiral [William] Sims and one of his aids.

•••

Of greater value and relevance is a news feature (a report on an article written by King) titled DAZZLE PAINTING that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (New South Wales, Australia) on September 2, 1919 (p. 6). This is the full text—

During the war the secrets of camouflage and dazzle painting were jealously guarded, but since then the curtain has been lifted, and an article by Mr. Cecil King in the last issue of the journal of The Imperial Arts League throws still further light on the subject. Dazzle painting is technically not camouflage, but a specialized and comparatively recent development of it. It was introduced in 1917, when Mr. Norman Wilkinson, the well-known marine artist, was placed in charge of the new department, with Mr. King as his assistant. Its success was instantaneous; before long the personnel of the staff had been many times multiplied, depots established in every part of consequence, and the whole of the mercantile marine which plied in dangerous waters clothed in a Josephean coat of many colors. The object of dazzle painting was briefly to create illusion by applying certain principles of optics to the treatment of solid masses by painting out shadows, for instance, or by painting them in where they did not exist. The effect of a good design was to make it extremely difficult for an observer from the waterline to determine the character or size of a ship, or to judge the course she was steering. As the design depended on its efficiency on its conformity to the structure of the individual ship, no two designs could be precisely alike, but by degrees certain schemes of color and arrangement were found to answer best, and then a general plan was adopted, with modification to suit each particular case; finally the "zebra pattern" was evolved, of which we have seen so many examples in Sydney Harbor. The dazzle painter's art was a highly complex one; he had to take many perplexing factors into consideration: different conditions of light and atmosphere required different methods of treatment. A design that would protect a ship bound for the Archangel through the misty grayness of the North Sea and the Arctic would be totally unsuitable for a voyage through the hard, brilliant light of the Mediterranean. He could not afford to work by rule of thumb, and the success which attended his efforts is proved by the decline in the rate of sinkings. While everyone rejoices in the removal of the occasion for dazzle painting, there are some who regret the latter's disappearance. It produced an effect resembling a crazy dream from Alice in Wonderland, but it gave a touch of variety and picturesqueness now lacking in shipping. To see a great liner in her camouflage was to be reminded of a very dignified and imposing lady reluctantly masquerading at a fancy dress ball in a fantastic futurist costume.

•••

Long after the war, King published an article titled MARINE CAMOUFLAGE (he was responding to an earlier article in the same magazine) in Ships and ship models: a magazine for all lovers of ships and the sea (November 1937, pp. 73-76). The article doesn't offer much that isn't already known (it does give credit to the work of Norman Wilkinson, Abbott H. Thayer, Professor Abel, W.L. Wylie, and an artist named Parkinson), as in the following excerpt (p. 74)—

Dazzle camouflage was based on a realization of the fact that it is impossible to conceal a merchant ship from the submarine, even if she be not emitting smoke, and that—if the presence of the ship were known—it was far better to confuse the submarine's estimates of her true course and other matters, by distorting her appearance, than to attempt any reduction of her visibility. This result had to be obtained by using violent contrasts of color, or rather of tone, many of the most efficient designs being of black and white only.

King's illustrations were often published in such prominent periodicals as The Sphere and Illustrated London News, and as travel posters. He was vice-president of the Society of Marine Artists, and, in 1932, became Marine Painter to the Royal Thames Yacht Club.

Cecil King died on December 9, 1942.

•••

Sources
Behrens, Roy R. Camoupedia: a compendium of research on art, architecture and camouflage. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books, 2006.
Behrens, Roy R., ed. Ship shape: a dazzle camouflage sourcebook. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books, 2006.
Taylor, James. Dazzle: disguise and disruption in war and art. UK: Pool of London Press, 2016.
Williams, David. Liners in battledress. St. Catharines, Ontario: Vanwell Publishing Ltd, 1989.

NOTE A shorter, different version of this text has also been contributed to askART.com. 

new signed copies still remain

Quasi-Camouflage | Hypothetical Dazzle Designs

Hypothetical Dazzle © Roy R. Behrens (2018)

Above Hypothetical ship camouflage designs of the sort that could have been used during World War I, as contrived by Roy R. Behrens. These are not actual examples of "dazzle-painting" from that era, but were created only recently by "finding" disruptive details in public domain photographs.

•••

Unsigned, NATIONAL ART GALLERY. Notable New Pictures. Register (Adelaide, South Australia), May 30, 1919, pp. 7-8—

…at the National Art Gallery in Adelaide on Thursday night, the President of the Board of Governors (Sir William Sowden) gave "A Traveler's Chat on Art," in the presence of a record audience for such an occasion…

The speaker…dealt first with the camouflage of ships during the war, and explained the subject. Referring to the San Francisco Exhibition Gallery, he said it was in parts the greatest chamber of pictorial horrors he had ever seen, but it was a temporary collection…

•••

Unsigned, DAY BY DAY. SMARTER SHIPS. Bright Colors Replace Drab Gray. The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania) (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), June 1, 1946, p. 3—

How great a difference a few coats of paint make in smartening a ship is illustrated by the changed appearances of the wharves in Tasmania's chief ports since the war ended. When a number of vessels are in port their funnels and upper works of various colors enhance the picturesqueness of the wharves. The change is a pleasant one, after the drab gray of the war days. The sense of surprise in seeing some familiar ship, after long years of war service, in her peacetime colors has not yet worn off. In the first World War, many steamers adopted camouflage, that is, they were painted in dazzling, zigzag hues of black, gray and white, but evidently experience taught this was of little purpose [sic]. At the beginning of the Second World War, a few ships went back to these stripe effects, but after a few months all adopted the uniform gray. So far Tasmania has seen only cargo vessels since the war. Let us hope that soon the larger interstate and oversea liners will be back again.

Still in Print

Camouflage Artist | Charles R. Capon

Charles R. Capon Bookplate

Above The bookplate of designer, typographer and World War I ship camoufleur Charles R. Capon.

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Charles R. Capon (1884-1954) was born in Toronto, Canada, where he initially planned to become a lawyer. After only nine months in law school, he chose instead to study art, and enrolled at the Ontario Academy of Design in the same city. Subsequently, he worked for several years as a graphic artist for various printers and advertising firms.

By May 1914, he was sufficiently successful that his work was featured in The Graphic Arts magazine (Boston), in a selection described as “the work of designers and illustrators who are doing fine work in the graphic arts field” (see title page below). 

The Graphic Arts (May 1914)

In 1915, he studied at the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston. Two years later, he became the art director at the Amsden Studio in Cleveland.

In 1917-1918, he worked as a ship camouflage artist, probably as a civilian and most likely in connection with the Emergency Fleet Corporation. In 1918, he was a member of The American Society of Marine Camoufleurs, who were associated with muralist and camoufleur William Andrew Mackay.

Following the war, Capon established a studio in Boston. For many years, in addition to working for major advertising clients, he became well-known for his commissioned bookplate designs. In the Directory of Bookplate Artists (1921), he described his work as follows: “I work in pen and ink and wash. I specialize in decorative landscape and period decoration.…I have been making bookplates for 15 years.” In 1950, his bookplates were acquired by the Library of Congress.

Title panel for Map of Old Boston (1929)

Among his most striking artworks is a Map of Old Boston that he designed in 1929 for the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank; a thistle-themed cover for the 1938 Strathmore Handbook for the Strathmore Paper Company; and an illustration of a new building on campus for the cover of the 1950 Bowdoin College Bulletin.

Shortly before his death, Capon gave his entire collection of graphic arts books to the library at Colby College in Waterville ME. The year of his death is sometimes listed as 1955, but according to the New York Times, he died on November 2, 1954 in Hancock NH.

Strathmore Handbook Cover (1938)