C A M O U P E D I A: artists

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Friday, May 1, 2026

preparing models for testing WWI dazzle camouflage

This is such an interesting photograph. The caption reads "Making models for testing World War I ship camouflage." The original is dated on the back as February 10, 1919, but that's absurd. It must have been made in 1918 (or even late 1917). Nor is the location a certainty. None of these people appear in other photographs of the staff members of the US Navy's Washington DC camouflage lab, nor is this the same room as in those photographs. It's also puzzling that one of them is a woman, most likely a civilian (all three appear to be in civilian clothing).

They are making ship models out of wood, using woodworking tools, such as the jigsaw on the left. In the center in the very back is a shelving unit on which finished, painted models are stored, and on the far right there is a suspended chart that shows various ship designs. Clearly evident also are the water sprinkler system pipes, which reminds us of a newspaper item from early 1918, reporting that the ship camouflage workshop had been damaged by fire. Based on a public domain government photograph at the Naval History and Heritage Command NH 41721 / digital coloring.

A grayscale print of this photograph was featured in an exhibition at the Hearst Center for the Arts (Cedar Falls IA) in 2018, for which the caption read—

During World War I, the process of designing ship camouflage began with the construction of unpainted wooden ship models, built to scale. These were then given to artist/designers, who devised diﬀerent camouflage schemes for each of the two sides of the models, in preparation for testing them in a periscope-equipped observation theatre.

sale-priced books / free domestic shipping

Thursday, April 9, 2026

Shoeless Joe Jackson was a ship camouflage painter

Shoeless Joe
JACKSON DOING BIT BY PAINTING SHIPS: FORMER WHITE SOX OUTFIELDER OBTAINS POSITION IN SHIPYARD: Not Only Man in Baseball Who Discovers He Could Better Be Employed Elsewhere Than on the Firing Line in The Postville Review (Postville IA) no date, 1918—

Joe Jackson, until recently of the White Sox ball team, besides possessing extraordinary athletic talents, is a man of unusual physical development. Presumably he would make an excellent fighting man. But it appears that Mr. Jackson would prefer not to fight.

The facts seem to be that Jackson was about to be drafted into the army, whereupon be obtained a position in an eastern shipyard. He is said to be doing his part to beat the Huns by painting ships. Whether this work is camouflage—we refer to the methods of painting—has not been announced.

Jackson is not the only man in professional baseball who has discovered special gifts that apparently could be employed to special advantage elsewhere outside the firing line. It is to be hoped that the American public will keep these men in mind. We need shipbuilders to win the war, but when a man on the eve of being drafted into the army suddenly finds that he can best serve the nation by painting ships, good Americans will not be very enthusiastic over seeing him play baseball after the war is over. The special gifts that disqualify him for the army will likewise disqualify him for special popularity in the great American game.

A word of praise should be said for those ball players who have entered the military forces. They will undoubtedly make a good record, and it is these men in particular that we shall want to see back on the diamond.

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

free and open to the public / art and camouflage talk

Coming soon. Save the date.

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

in the process of applying ship camouflage during WWI

Above There are few photographs of World War I ship camouflage (maybe a dozen or fewer) in the process of being applied. This one may have been published only once, when it appeared in the Boston Sunday Post, August 18, 1918. The headline read BEHOLD THE CAMOUFLAGE, while the caption was worded as follows—

Here is a picture of our Jackies [sailors] helping to make a ship look like what it ain't. All it takes is a couple of mattresses, a few buckets of paint, and a few sweeps of the brush, and you have the perfectly camouflaged ship.

Camouflage, as you may possibly know, is the science of artistic concealment, and the patterns used are preferably cubistic or futuristic, as these are those which conceal the art most perfectly.

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Monday, March 16, 2026

marvelous designs and colors calculated to confuse

Above Just when we think we've found everything, suddenly something new appears. The images above and below were made by British artist Frank H. Mason as illustrations for Stephen King-Hall, The Diary of a U-boat Commander. London: Hutchinson and Company, 1920. I have no idea of the book's veracity; in one library record, for example, it is classified as "fiction."

•••

Kaleidoscope of Ships: Camouflage in Eastern Harbors Look Like Futurist Nightmare in Journal and Tribune (Knoxville TN), March 8, 1918—

If some ancient mariner were to return to one of our eastern ports these days he would think the shipping world had gone mad. The submarine has called forth the camouflage artist, and the camouflage artist has painted our trans-Atlantic vessels with bizarre designs in all colors of the rainbow.

Imaginative writers used to dwell on the kaleidoscope of shipping in great harbors like New York. The term is thoroughly applicable today, for our harbors are as colorful as operatic pageants. Half of some great ship will be painted a delicate baby blue and the other half will be an arrangement in great circles and stripes and bands in black, green, yellow and pink. Another vessel will appear dressed in a succession of waving colors ranging from pink to purple. A steamship no longer resembles a steamship. It looks like a futurist nightmare.

There are two rival schools of marine camouflage. One works on the theory of low visibility and the other one strives for what is called the dazzle effect. The low visibility camoufleurs paint the ships in waving lines with the basic light ray tones—reds and greens and violets—with the idea of having the vessels merge with the atmosphere and disappear. The dazzle school goes in for a system of marvelous designs and colors calculated to confuse the aim of enemy gunners.

Even our battle ships have succumbed to the lure of strange pigmentation. The sober "fighting gray" battle ship color is a thing of the past. Our fighting craft go to their grim business in the war zone made up like [the] Russian ballet.—Independent.

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Friday, January 16, 2026

camouflaged dummies as artists' wartime specialty

soldiers placing decoys / artist unknown
CAMOUFLAGE—THE ARTISTS' BIT IN THE WAR in Oregon Daily Journal (Portland), August 18, 1917—

One of the interesting developments of the world war is the art of "camouflage," wherein artists excel. Camouflage is accomplished in a variety of ways, the general Idea being to deceive the enemy—to make him think he sees something that he doesn't see, or to make him see something he thinks he doesn't.

It is a trick in which nature excels, the wily opossum and the chameleon and its coat of changeable hue being probably the best known examples. The marking on the wings of a butterfly, the shaping of insects like leaves, the coloring of the sage hen to blend with the sagebrush, are but a few of the natural demonstrations of the principle of camouflage.

In warfare, thrusting above a trench a helmet stuck on a bayonet to draw enemy fire is a crude example. Raiders carry a dummy smokestack to hide their identity, submarines carry fake periscopes, etc.

Getting down to the finer points of the game, and this is where the artists come in, waves and foam are painted on a warship to deceive the enemy as to the ship's waterline, and the "tank" is so painted that at a comparatively short distance it merges with the landscape and is hard to distinguish.

The French and English have even gone so far as to stretch canvas upright to a height of several feet, and to paint trees, shrubbery and landscape on it, so that to the enemy it will look like the edge of a woods. Behind this curtain, then, like stage hands passing behind the back drop on a stage, thousands of troops have marched to new positions. To fool enemy airmen, canvas stretched like a canopy over a roadway is painted to blend with the surrounding field, while soldiers march beneath It, or it ls painted to represent a road over which the enemy will keep lookout for troops while the troops march elsewhere.

And so on. Camouflage is really playing an important part in strategy of campaigning, and the United States army war department has so recognized it as to put artists at the large training camps to teach the art, and painters and decorators are enlisting in special camouflage branches of the service. The illustration above shows troops placing "dummy" soldiers in position to draw enemy fire, and [below] is a camouflaged "Yankee" [a dummy made of papier maché, before being painted]…

inspection of unpainted American decoy

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

a panoply of cartoonists' views of WWI camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Saturday, December 27, 2025

Alon Bement's 1925 article on illusions & camouflage

This five-page article on ship camouflage has now been posted online and can be downloaded as a pdf. Its author, American artist Alon Bement, was an important teacher of Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University, who served as a civilian camoufleur during World War I. We have blogged about him in the past. Here is the link.

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Nov shmoz ka pop / WWI spurious wacko camouflage

an inept attempt at camouflage / WWI
Gene Ahern (originator in 1921 of the Our Boarding House comic strip featuring Major Hoople), "Ain't Nature Wonderful: Camouflage Still Yet" in Fort Wayne Sentinel, August 14, 1918, p. 3—

About this camouflage music, we juggle the camouflage art on themselves so they would be in their seventh heaven, and have their victims turning flip flaps. A book agent could waft into your office camouflaged as a puff of cigar smoke, and could annoy you with special offers, beautiful bindings, subscriptions, etc., and the only way to get rid of him is to purchase a piece of his stock, because you can't get a toe hold on him to throw him out because he's camouflaged invisible.

Insurance posts could wear the same harness, so you're in for it, fellow citizens, and the only exit for you is to take a try at the camouflage trick yourself.

F'rinstance: Have a 6x3 ebony box in your office and when an ill wind shows up, camouflage yourself like you just expired and fall into the silver-handled box and have on your fizz a camouflaged doesn't-he-look-natural expression.

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Saturday, December 13, 2025

camouflage, patriotism and propaganda / a big parade

It was Oscar Wilde who said: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." And surely one might also surmise that some of the world's most godawful music springs from patriotism.

Shown here is the sheet music cover (as well as the record label) for My Dream of the Big Parade, a rousing composition from World War I. The cover is signed by a WWI-era British artist named Starmer, probably Walter P. Starmer (1877-1961).

He was not a camouflage artist, but in the top left background of the illustration you can see that he has included a dazzle-painted British ship, not unlike the RMS Olympia.

Starmer was British, but a note at the bottom left of the sheet music cover says "Made in USA", and the music was created by Jimmy McHugh (1894-1969), a prolific American composer who devised such famous songs as I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby, and On the Sunny Side of the Street.

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Thursday, November 27, 2025

Native American camouflage / hidden in animal skins

Above Engraving by Dutch publisher Theodor de Bry (1591), based on a drawing by French artist Jacques LeMoyne de Morgues (c. 1533-1588), made during explorations of what is now Florida in the 1560s. It documents the use of animal skins for disguise, as described below by LeMoyne.

The Indians hunt deer in a way we have never seen before. They hide themselves in the skin of a very large deer which they have killed some time before. They place the animal's head upon their own head, looking through the eye holes as through a mask. In this disguise they approach the deer without frightening them. They choose the time when the animals come to drink at the river, shooting them easily with bow and arrow.

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Monday, November 24, 2025

will shoe makers soon decree that shoes be dissimilar

Above Giacomo Balla, Sketches for Futurist clothing (1914). See Caroline Galambosova, How Italian Futurism Influenced Fashion (2025).

•••

Anon, SHOES DIFFER IN COLOR from The Davenport Democrat and Leader (Davenport IA) on March 1, 1925, p. 3—

Futurism, cubism or some other art complex has descended upon French custom boot makers, who insist that they set the styles in women's shoes for the world. These boot makers all are of one mind in turning out symmetrical footwear. The first models of this year styles were shown, a few weeks ago. They seemed freakish, but the boot makers have carried their original ideas further until now one side of a shoe Is quite different, not only in design, but in color, from the other side. Humorists are speculating whether the makers will not soon decree that right and left shoes be entirely dissimilar.

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Sunday, November 23, 2025

is that a woman shampooing her cornfield?—say what!

Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette's Letter from London, "River Reflections" in THE SKETCH, June 5, 1918, p. 276—

[I am reminded of] a little true yarn which of course is not apropos (oh, not at all!) but which may make you grin. It is a tale of one of yous, a pre-war painter, a famous one of the future. When war broke out he left his velvet coat for khaki, and went off whistling. He got wounded and was sent back home to a wife who objected to his pipe, and would tidy his studio and took unto herself the right to choose his models! He stood it for a little while, after which he tried to get back into the Army. The doctors, however, would not pass him for active service. A friend in authority advised him to apply for camouflage work, and obligingly took a few of his canvases to show the Red-Capped-One who Decideth one of the Futurist masterpieces.

"Humph, call that painting? What is it, anyway?"

"A woman shampooing her hair, Sir."

"Hair, is it? Looks more like a cornfield to me."

"Well, Sir, isn't that camouflage?"

And the Futurist one was fortunate, and is now camouflaging unflaggingly.

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Thursday, August 28, 2025

a rich beauty of color is given to camouflaged ships

Charles Dickens (c1860s)

C. Lewis Hind, ART AND I. New York: John Lane Company, 1921, p. 323—

“…Paul and John Nash are originals, They were a cult before 1914. Now they are emerging, but they keep their quaint vision. Spencer Pryse is a classicist, who dips classicism into a bath of graceful and forceful modernity. Muirhead Bone was a past master in architectural drawings before the war. The sights he has seen have had little effect upon his art. He remains a searching and exquisite draftsman. John Everett has seen the rich beauty of color in the camouflaged ships. He is the most gallant of the war artists; he gives to these ships a beauty—“

John Everett, Lepanto (1918)

I paused, because Mr. X was not listening. He was smiling at his own thoughts, and as he smiled he began to turn the pages of [Charles Dickens’] American Notes.

“You used the word ‘gallant,’ sir. It is a favorite word with Mrs. X, and on more than one occasion she has applied it to Charles Dickens. And upon my word, sir, I think Madame is right. In the early portion of American Notes he refers to the beauty of the ladies of Boston, and on page 108 he uses almost precisely the same term in reference to the ladies of New York.

“There was no camouflage about Charles Dickens—no, sir!”…

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025

camoufleur Bérard made Chantecler farm yard scene

costume from Chantecler

Back in 2014, we blogged about the French stage designer Louis Bérard, perhaps best known as "le decorateur de Chantecler," a wonderfully zany satirical play by Edmund Rostand, in which all the actors were dressed in animal costumes (as shown above). But he was also a camoufleur for the French during World War I. More recently, we've found a different news article on his life and work, reprinted below.

•••

SCENERY FOR WAR: M. [Louis] Bérard of "Chantecler" Fame a Camouflage Artist in The Spokesman-Review (Spokane WA) May 28, 1918—

Camouflage is an art which attracts the best artists who have been engaged for some time in painting scenery for war.

In Paris there are many studios, employing thousands of men and women. In Montmartre there is a studio where young American artists of the Latin Quarter are busy camouflaging for the American front. Not only guns, but motor trucks, buildings—whole villages even—have to be made to appear what they are not, which, indeed, is the essence of camouflage.

A French scene painter, M. [Louis] Bérard, was one of the inventors of war camouflage. For the last 35 years he has been the leading French scene painter, to whose genius was due the scenic triumphs of the Sardou and Rostand plays. It was he who created the marvelous farm yard scene in Chantecler, and it was the trees which he built for this play which gave him the idea for the observation posts which look like trees.

When war broke out M. Bérard had turned 60 years of age, but he at once offered his services to the French government, and asked to be allowed to go to the front to develop his ideas of camouflage.

With the assistance of his expert pupils he created "lakes" where there was no water, "forests" where no trees grow, and thousands of guns, huts and artillery emplacements changed their hue as the seasons advanced. When M. Bérard put the finishing touches to a particular important piece of work he would go up in an airplane to obtain the same view as that afforded to the Boche.

•••

Note In Cécile Coutin's Tromper l'ennemi (2012) Louis Bérard (1865-1920) is described as an accessoiriste de théatre (property man) who served in the Section de Camouflage (1914-15) as a camouflage instructor at the studio at Amiens. She includes a three-page section on "Louis Bérard and His Contribution to the Invention of Camouflage" (pp. 48-51). It will require translation, since the text is in French.

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Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

Monday, August 4, 2025

Greenwich Village artists object to phony residents

Greenwich Village Follies / program cover 1921

ARTISTS WANT GREENWICH VILLAGE PURGED OF ALL BOOTLEGGING CAMOUFLAGE in Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg MA, September 19, 1922, p. 7—

New York. Sept 19—The high cost of studio apartments In New York City Is partly explained, at least in the declaration of the rent committee of the League of American Artists, that such quarters are much sought for by bootleggers. The artists In complaining to the district attorney's office asked police Investigation with the view to raising the moral average of Greenwich Village and the Columbus Circle art neighborhood.

"The studio is well adapted to camouflage," Stewart Browne, president of the United Real Estate Owners' association, said "but it is too late for New Yorkers to get excited over that. Real estate owners cannot control it entirely. "

Artists have demanded that the police rid their colonies of painters who can’t paint, sculptors who can't sculpt, and models who can't pose.

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