engaged by the government to design ship camouflage

Hobart (left) and Spencer Nichols

We have known about an American artist named Spencer Baird Nichols (1875-1950) for some time, and we earlier blogged about the fact that he and his older brother, named Henry Hobart Nichols Jr. (usually known as Hobart Nichols) (1869-1962), also an artist, both served during World War I as civilian ship camouflage artists. We know this because they are listed as being among the artists who were affiliated with the Marine Camoufleurs of the US Shipping Board, Second District, a section that was headed by William Andrew MacKay. It is also mentioned in various news articles from that time period. Unfortunately, there is little if any mention of their camouflage contributions in other online articles, including Wikipedia.

When we blogged about them earlier, we published a newspaper item from 1919, which reported that Hobart Nichols had given a talk about wartime ship camouflage at the Nondescript Club in Bronxville NY.

Since then, two additional factors have come to light: 

One is an article in the Evening Star (Washington DC) from July 23, 1898, which reveals that Spencer Nichols had left Washington for St Louis, “to join the United States engineer corps in camp there.” He has done this, as the article states, “in the capacity of an artist, and his regular work will be of a kind that is not uncongenial to him, and it will afford him at the same time an excellent chance to gather material that may prove of the greatest value to him later on.” It is not clear from the article if his service was connected to the Spanish-American war, which had broken out in April of the same year.

The other item is a more detailed article in the Bronxville Review on March 4, 1933, p. 19, for which the headline reads: SPENCER NICHOLS, NOW TEACHING HERE, WAS GOVERNMENT ARTIST DURING WAR. The article goes on to say—

A native of Washington DC, where he studied with Howard Helmick at the Art Students League, Mr. Nichols first came to New York as the associate of the late Louis Tifanny. For fifteen years, he executed Commissions for stained glass windows in important churches and other publc buildings and designed decorations for homes and institutions. During the war Mr. Nichols was engaged by the government to design camouflage for transports: his technical knowledge of color and design was applied to giving a ship the appearance of being out of alignment with its true course—a responsible and difficult task for the wartime artist.