Roy R. Behrens, Seeing through Camouflage: Abbott Thayer, Background-Picturing and the Use of Cutout Silhouettes, in Leonardo, Vol 51, No 1, pp. 4046, 2018, pp. 41-46—
In collaboration with his son, artist and naturalist Gerald Handerson Thayer, at some point Abbott Handerson Thayer began to espouse a new kind of camouflage called background-picturing. With that concept, he contended that the appearance of animals had evolved toward being well suited for their customary habitat.
As he put it, the patterns on their bodies are "a picture of such background as would be seen through it if it were transparent."
But animals are rarely immobile. They move from one setting to another, and Thayer was not suggesting that an animal's pattern is a literal pictorial image of a single background. That would be counterproductive. Instead, he reasoned, it is an average of a range of typical settings, a generic abstracted equivalent of the appearance(s) of the animal's usual haunts. In Thayer's words, the patterns found on animals are "a sort of compound picture of their normal backgrounds—a picture seemingly made up by the averaging of innumerable landscapes.”…[more]
As he put it, the patterns on their bodies are "a picture of such background as would be seen through it if it were transparent."
But animals are rarely immobile. They move from one setting to another, and Thayer was not suggesting that an animal's pattern is a literal pictorial image of a single background. That would be counterproductive. Instead, he reasoned, it is an average of a range of typical settings, a generic abstracted equivalent of the appearance(s) of the animal's usual haunts. In Thayer's words, the patterns found on animals are "a sort of compound picture of their normal backgrounds—a picture seemingly made up by the averaging of innumerable landscapes.”…[more]