Gladys Thayer | Daughter of Abbott Handerson Thayer

Abbott H. Thayer, Gladys (c1915).

Above Abbott Handerson Thayer, Gladys (c1915). Oil on canvas. Original is in the collection of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

•••

Gladys Thayer (also known as Gladys Thayer Reasoner) was born in Woodstock CT on July 17, 1886. Her parents were Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) a well-known American painter and naturalist, and Catherine (Kate) Bloede Thayer (1846-1891), who was descended from a family of accomplished German writers, scientists and political reformers. There were five children in the Thayer family, two of whom, the second and third, died while still in infancy. Those who lived to be adults were Mary (1876-?), Gerald (1883-1935) and Gladys.

Shortly after Gladys’ birth, a friend of the family reported that “[Abbott] Thayer is boiling over with happiness of a healthy girl baby and all goes well in the Thayer household.” At the same time, Kate’s father’s health began to fail and he died in May 1888. Kate Thayer lapsed into a severe depression (referred to then as melancholia), and was hospitalized for extended treatment. Over time, her condition worsened and she died in 1891. A few months later, Thayer married a family friend, Emmeline Buckingham Beach, who had assisted the family for years, and whom the children called “Aunt Addie.”

Gladys Thayer grew up in what has been described as an “eccentric” or unconventional household. She and her siblings were kept out of school, for fear of being exposed to contagious illnesses (not unreasonable at the time). Their “home-schooled” education was a rich combination of daily activities, centered on classical reading, writing, art, music, overseas travel, nature studies and enlivened dinner discussions. It was supplemented by modeling for their father, and in other ways assisting him as he took on commissions from wealthy art patrons.

A central component, shared by everyone in the family, was an insatiable interest in animals (some of which were taken in as exotic house pets). Abbott Thayer “loved animals and each family dog seemed to take a scarcely less important place than the humans,” Gladys recalled of her father. “We had countless happy times with him, and wood walks and twilight fires stand out among the happiest.”

In his autobiography, book publisher George Palmer Putnam II describes his youthful friendships with Gerald Handerson Thayer (an artist and naturalist) and Rockwell Kent (a Thayer student). He visited Dublin briefly in his late teens, and he recalls that Gladys (known as Galla) was “a fragrant girl with a special beauty all her own.” He fell in love with her and they briefly dreamed of marriage. But “the idyll did not materialize,” because his parents sent him overseas, “and by the time I returned, Galla sensibly thought better of it.” He later married the aviator Amelia Earhart, who was also on occasion a visitor to Dublin.

As did all the Thayer children, Gladys studied drawing and painting with her father, and also no doubt profited from the presence of students and apprentices, among them Kent, Richard Merryman, Barry Faulkner, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and the sons of William James, named William Jr. (Billy) and Alexander (Alec). Gladys contributed to the illustrations that were published in Abbott and Gerald’s early, influential book on animal camouflage, as did Kent, Merryman and Aunt Addie. It was titled Concealing coloration in the animal kingdom: an exposition of the laws of disguise through color and pattern (1909). Gerald is deservingly listed as the book’s author, but in truth his father was in charge, with assistance from others as needed.

As Gladys reached adulthood, her father encouraged her to exhibit her drawings, pastels and paintings. In February 1906, her work was featured with that of her father at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Her most accomplished single work may be a portrait of her father that dates from 1907 or shortly thereafter. He wrote notes to the gallery owner and art dealers, encouraging them to show her work, which typically consisted of still-lifes and landscapes. Occasionally her work was shown at Knoedler Gallery, Vose Galleries of Boston, and Grand Central Galleries. The reviews were politely supportive.

As Abbott Thayer aged, his mental and physical health declined. He admitted to being susceptible to what today is known as bipolar disorder or manic-depressive episodes. He described this as the “the Abbott pendulum,” in which his moods would fluctuate between “all-wellity” at one extreme and “sick disgust” at the other. Near the end of his life, he was assisted in his studio by three apprentices, Henry O’Connor (1891-1975) and Frederick Rhodes Sisson (1893-1962) from Boston, and David O. Reasoner, an Indiana-born artist who had worked for the US Shipping Board as a civilian camouflage artist during WWI.

In his final months, Abbott Thayer was progressively disabled by strokes. According to Gladys, it was primarily Reasoner who attended to Thayer’s needs and “toward the end did little besides take care of him.” The frequency of the strokes increased and he died on May 29, 1921.

Throughout the span of this ordeal, Gladys Thayer and David Reasoner had become a couple, and, about ten days after Abbott’s death, they were married on June 6, 1921. In subsequent years, they became the parents of four children, Allen (who would die at age twenty in a wartime training accident), Jean (portrait painter Jean Reasoner Plunket), Peggy and Richard. In 1924, the family moved to Woodstock, New York, an artists’ colony in the Catskill Mountains. For the next decade, David Reasoner was associated with the Woodstock Country Club, while he also worked as manager of the Woodstock Playhouse.

Throughout these years, Gladys continued to paint and to exhibit her work on occasion, but rarely at prominent galleries. In the fall of 1932, thirty-one of her artworks were exhibited for two weeks at the Woodstock Country Club Tavern, and a selection of her flower paintings were shown at the Grand Central Art Gallery in New York in January 1935.

Beginning in the spring of 1937, for about three years, the Reasoner family was almost nomadic. They traveled across the country by station wagon, often camping out, and living intermittently at various locations in California (San Diego, Point Loma, Santa Barbara, Montecito, and Santa Monica). In 1940, after David Reasoner’s father died, the family moved back to his hometown, Upland, Indiana, to care for his ailing mother.

The U.S. entered WWII at the end of 1941. U.S. ship camouflage experts knew that Gladys’ father and her brother Gerald had informally advised the Allies on camouflage during WW I. Since David Reasoner had also been a ship camoufleur during that war, he thought he might again find work in the same capacity. In January 1942, he moved to Washington DC, accompanied by his daughter Jean, while his wife remained with her mother-in-law in Indiana. Unfortunately, as Jean recalls, “technology had made most of his camouflage skills obsolete,” and he never secured that position.

The time frame is unclear, but at some point during WWII, Gladys Thayer Reasoner joined her husband in Washington, DC, where she died of cancer on August 25,1945.

•••

Sources
Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer family papers, 1851-1999, bulk 1881-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
“Artist discovers rare self-portrait by Thayer” (1948) in The Kingston Daily Freeman (Kingston NY). December 14, pp. 1 and 17.
Behrens, Roy R. (1988) “The theories of Abbott H. Thayer: father of camouflage” Leonardo (MIT Press). Vol 21 No 3, pp. 291-296.
Behrens, Roy R. (2002) False colors: Art, design and modern camouflage. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books.
Bowdoin, W.G. (1921) “Oil Paintings by Gladys Thayer at Macbeth Gallery” in The (NY) Evening World, April 11, p. 10.
Cortissoz, Royal (1919) “Originality in art, natural and artificial: Painting by Twachtman; Miss Thayer’s portraits” in New York Tribune, January 12, p. 7.
“Gladys Reasoner to hold exhibition” (1932) in The Kingston Daily Freeman, July 25, p. 6.
Plunket, Jean Reasoner (1998) Faces that won’t sit still: An update. Washington DC: Self-published.
Putnam, G.P. (1942) Wide margins: A publisher’s autobiography. NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Thayer, Gerald H. (1909) Concealing coloration in the animal kingdom: An exposition of the laws of disguise through color and pattern. NY: Macmillan.
White, Nelson C. (1951) Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and naturalist. Hartford CT: Connecticut Printers.

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

Theatrical special effects | Thayer's disappearing man

Abbott H. Thayer holding one of his duck decoys (upsidedown)

Until recently, I had not heard of Percy MacKaye (1875-1956), an American poet and playwright. That should come as no surprise, since (according to Michael J Mendelsohn in his essay by on “Percy Mackaye’s Dramatic Theories”), he “is rarely mentioned today.” But in “the pre-Freudian, pre-O’Neill days of American drama, he was a major figure.”

A Harvard graduate, MacKaye traveled and lived in Europe from 1897 to 1900, then returned to the US to teach at a private school in New York. In 1904, he moved to Cornish NH (ten miles from Plainfield), where he was allied with the Cornish Art Colony, which included such prominent artists as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Maxfield Parrish, Daniel Chester French, Paul Manship, George de Forest Brush, and Barry Faulkner.

Sixty-five miles southeast of Cornish is Dublin NH, at the foot of Mount Monadnock. At the time, there was considerable contact between the artists in Cornish and Dublin, in part because the latter was the location of the disheveled home and studio of artist-naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer (the so-called “father of camouflage”). Faulkner was Thayer’s cousin,  Brush was his closest friend, and some of the artists mentioned above were his long-time associates.

Only lately have I learned that Thayer and Percy MacKaye were also acquainted, possibly well-acquainted, and, in 1906, they made an attempt to collaborate on the “special effects” for the staging of Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe’s 1907 production of MacKaye’s play about Joan of Arc, titled Jeanne d’Arc. The playscript was dedicated to Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

In the script, Jeanne d’Arc reveals that she has been visited by St Michael the Archangel. In a couple of scenes, “the glorified form of St Michael” appears as an apparition, then disappears. At a certain point, the ghostly form of Charles the Great (aka Charlemagne) appears within a stained glass surface, then speaks with the voice of St Michael. Obviously, anyone producing the play would need to decide how to handle these ethereal appearances (and vanishing acts) of Jeanne's visions of St Michael.

As early as the mid-1890s, Abbott Thayer had been researching, writing about, and devising demonstrations of a natural form of camouflage called countershading (essentially inverse shading). He claimed that it accounted for the prevalence of “white undersides” in the coloration of animals.

Thayer's disappearing duck (as recreated by Fuertes)

Using wooden duck decoys, as seen in the photographs above (or even raw sweet potatoes), he could make solid forms all but vanish in a natural ground surrounding. (In these two photographs, made by Thayer's student, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, a white sheet of paper has been placed behind the duck decoys to make the counter-shaded one visible, on the right.) Scientific audiences were astonished by his outdoor demonstrations of this. He published articles about countershading in scientific journals, and it led to his being invited to European universities to demonstrate and to install exhibitions of the same phenomenon.

Thayer was inept at managing money. But when his discovery of countershading (sometimes known as Thayer’s law) was received so laudably, he began to imagine practical ways by which he and his family could profit. One of his options had to do with theatrical stage effects. Instead of vanishing duck decoys, could countershading be applied to an actor’s skin-toned leotards, and then, by a simple switch of the lights, might the actor disappear?

We know that Thayer actually carried this out because two photographs of the effect have survived (as reproduced below). They are before-and-after photographs of a male artist’s model (a Boston man named Dutton) wearing counter-shaded tights, in the setting of a lighted box. In one, the light is coming from the bottom (contrary to natural lighting), in which case the figure is easily seen. In the other photograph, the light is coming from the top, and the model all but disappears.

Thayer's vanishing actor in counter-shaded leotards

In 1906, as Percy MacKaye was preparing for the premiere of Jeanne d’Arc, he may have reached out to Thayer—more likely Thayer appealed to him—about the possibility of using on-stage countershading as a way to bring about the appearance and disappearance of St Michael. We know this in part because MacKaye described it in Percy MacKaye: A Sketch of His Life with Bibliography of His Works (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1922). Here is the passage—

Midwinter, in the little town hall of Dublin NH: a man-model against a dusky curtain: Abbott Thayer, the artist-inventor, intent, excited, testing (in 1906!) his new “camouflage” principles to create a stained-glass vision of Charlemagne for the Sothern-Marlowe production of my play Jeanne d’Arc.

But did their collaborative efforts succeed? The answer is no: In the end, their project came to naught. There are letters from Thayer to MacKaye in the Archives of American Art that record his frantic if genuine efforts to locate appropriate lanterns and to photograph the model in tights. On March 26, 1906, he sent photographs to MacKaye (perhaps the same two reproduced here), saying: “When Dutton got his suit on again, and took his place, the effect was almost as perfect as ever, quite enough without a single retouch (but the lantern’s the thing!)” A full month later, on April 26, he assured MacKaye that he has made “progress, but only that,” and is awaiting a shipment of new and better lanterns, which, he hopefully asserts, “will make a true total invisibility.”

There is apparently more to the story, but the details remain rather murky. In the files of the Archives of American Art, there is another letter to MacKaye (dated May 25), written by Emma Thayer, on behalf of Abbott, her husband. She reveals that Thayer is overwhelmed, and instead—

he has got that gifted young man [his student] Rockwell Kent (whom Abbott wanted before and could not) to do the thing. Abbott has had him up here, and Abbott says he will do it superbly. But to make sure Abbott is having him do the only complicated thing, the St Michael, first and if he has any difficulty he is to telegraph Abbott, and Abbott will go down.

Rockwell Kent is swiftness itself—and having more endurance can do the thing quicker than Abbott, and is masterly and precise in the way he does everything.

Despite such good intentions, Thayer and Kent were not able to provide a final prototype for the Sothern and Marlowe production. “Unable to get [it] together in time,” according to Thayer’s biographer, Nelson C. White, the collaborative experiment concluded “in complete failure.”

Soon after, Thayer came to realize the futility of making a fortune by inventing practical things. As he wrote to his patron, Charles L. Freer (as quoted by White)—

My failure to make my cursed invention suit itself to Sothern’s immediate needs was the eye-opener I need. I had gone on thinking the Thayer family must have the thousands I was to scoop so easily so as to set me free to work. My eyes opened for good and all and although the thing got into such perfected shape that it seems both to me and my patent lawyer destined for success, nothing will divert another thought from my own work [as an artist], which envelops me like the arms of a beloved again…

…P.P.S. The theatre invention is all ready for someone to take up, patent applied for and covered already in four foreign lands. If the right man looms up within a year or two he shall have it. Otherwise, it can go to hell. I am safe cured! 

•••

Updates
The above was posted only three days ago, but I've just found two updates, including one that's especially surprising: (1) From a news article about a talk that Gerald H. Thayer gave in 1921 in Lowell MA (Lowell Sun, January 20) it appears that he showed the lantern slides of the model who vanished in his leotards. In the article, the space in which the man is posed is described as a "piano box" (a box for shipping pianos), set up in the Dublin NH town hall. (2) Today, I found out that the autobiography of psychologist Michael Wertheimer, the son of Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, has been published in Europe. I couldn't resist buying a digital copy, as expensive as it was. When I paged through it, I was completely aghast to discover that Michael's first wife's grandfather (her mother's father) was—you guessed it—Percy MacKaye. See photo below—I do love these hidden links.

Percy MacKaye

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

SALE book bundle / free shipping

 

Camouflage Artist | David O. Reasoner

USS Banago (1918) in dazzle camouflage (digital coloring)

David O(rville) Reasoner was born in 1882 in Upland IN. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where he graduated in 1909. In subsequent years, he studied painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 

During World War I, Reasoner was employed by the US Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation, as a civilian navy camouflage artist, in the course of which he applied camouflage designs to US merchant ships. Records in the Archives of American Art indicate that his assignment officially ended on December 15, 1918.

Around 1920, Reasoner and two other Boston artists (Henry O’Connor (1891-1975) and Frederick Rhodes Sisson (1893-1962)) became apprentices and assistants to Abbott Handerson Thayer at the well-known painter’s home and studio in Dublin NH. Thayer’s publications about the “concealing coloration of animals” had influenced the development of Allied wartime camouflage during WWI. In various sources, Reasoner, O’Connor and Sisson have been described (along with other apprentices) as Thayer’s “copyists” (they made precise duplicates of his unfinished paintings, from which he then went on to make different finished versions). Also cited as an assistant in his later years was a painter named Grace Dredge (1895-?), originally from Des Moines IA.

Thayer’s health (both physical and psychological) was declining rapidly in the winter of 1920-1921, and according to Gladys Thayer (called Galla), the artist’s daughter, it was primarily David Reasoner who attended to Thayer’s needs and “toward the end did little besides take care of him.”

As described in Ross Anderson’s biography of the artist—

In the spring of 1921, while resting in bed Thayer asked an assistant [Reasoner] to bring him one of his unfinished canvases and his palette and brushes. As he began to work, his hand suddenly stiffened, evidence of a slight stroke. He suffered two more within the next three weeks, and died from a third on May 29, 1921.

Years later, Reasoner provided his own account of Thayer’s last weeks in a 1948 news article in The Kingston [New York] Daily Freeman, in which the following text appears:

Even on his [Abbott Thayer’s] deathbed, painting was uppermost on his mind. The family physician had told [David] Reasoner ‘It won’t be long. He might last the day out.’ Thayer had been working on a picture promised for shipment to a New York gallery. The elderly man asked Dave to bring up the picture from the studio. It was set up where he could see it from his bed. He then required Dave to darken a small area near the bottom. ‘No, a little higher—now a little to the left. No, no, come and help me over to it.’ Any movement would likely be his last, but Reasoner knew he would try to do it alone if he didn’t help so he practically carried Thayer to the spot that needed darkening. It is said that half the time, Thayer worked paint with his thumb instead of a brush, and the thumb had a beat as regular as a metronome after fifty years of use.

Curiously, there is a public record that Grace Dredge and Lyman Reasoner (David Reasoner’s brother) were married on May 28, 1921, in Keene, New Hampshire (a dozen miles from Dublin), one day before Thayer’s death. She took on the married name of Grace Dredge Reasoner (and later, Grace Reasoner Clark). Ten days later, on June 6, 1921 (according to an Indiana University alumni note), David Reasoner and Gladys Thayer were also married.

Following Thayer’s death (based on correspondence in the Thayer Family Papers in the AAA), it appears that Thayer’s son, Gerald Handerson Thayer (called Gra) was initially the executor of Thayer’s estate. Somewhat later, due to an unclear set of circumstances, the role of executor was shifted to David Reasoner.

Around 1925, the Reasoners moved to Woodstock, New York. They became the parents of four children, Allen (who died during World War II), Jean (portrait painter Jean Reasoner Plunket), Peggy and Richard.  According to online information, plans for that facility—

began in 1928 with the formation of Woodstock Property, Inc. (WPI), founded by David O. Reasoner, an Indiana-born artist with a superb golf game. After selling stock in WPI Reasoner negotiated the purchase of 250 acres of farmland…WPI then leased the land to Woodstock Country Club, Inc. at a nominal fee. Reasoner presided over both WPI and the Country Club…

At about the same time, the Woodstock Playhouse was founded, under David Reasoner’s management, a position that he continued to hold for at least the next few years. A solo exhibition of his wife’s paintings was held at the Woodstock Country Club Tavern in August 1932.

Beginning in the spring of 1937, for about three years, the Reasoner family was all but nomadic, traveling across the country by station wagon, often camping out, and living intermittently at various locations in California (San Diego, Point Loma, Santa Barbara, Montecito, and Santa Monica). In June of 1940, when David Reasoner’s mother became ill, they moved back to his hometown, Upland IN, about 75 miles northeast of Indianapolis.

The US entered WWII at the end of 1941. In early January, David Reasoner (leaving his wife to care for his ailing mother in Indiana) moved to Washington DC­­, accompanied by his daughter Jean, in the hope that, given his experience in the previous war, he might once again find work as a ship camoufleur. In late January 1942, he met with artists Charles Bittinger (1879-1970), head of the U.S. Navy Research Department, and Everett Warner (1877-1963), both of whom had been involved in WWI camouflage. According to a Reasoner letter (in February 1942), he had been told by Bittinger that it was “just a question of time until there will be all-out marine camouflage,” and that “when this happens, I  seem to be in line for the top job.” But, according to a later letter (June 1942), he was eventually assigned not to camouflage but to “managerial duties”: “Instead of camouflaging ships I find myself an impresario, secretary, and telephone operator.”
 

News article from Kingston Daily Freeman, New York (1948)

In the same 1948 news article (cited earlier) in The Kingston [New York] Daily Freeman, there is a story that contends that, when David Reasoner moved to Washington DC, he gave to Walter Seaton, a Woodstock friend and artist, "what he thought were a lot of old canvases," including some from Thayer's studio. One of those canvases, as Seaton discovered while cleaning them for future reuse, was a previously unknown Thayer self-portrait, one of only four he made. Included in the news article is a low quality newsprint photograph (reproduced here) of Seaton (standing on the left) and other local artists with the newly discovered painting.

A few years earlier, Gladys Thayer Reasoner had rejoined her husband in Washington, DC, where she died in August 1945. David Reasoner’s mother, Louanna, remained in Indiana and died in 1948.  

In a letter dated October 4, 1949, David Reasoner (on behalf of the Thayer Estate) donated to the Smithsonian Institution 96 sketches, photographs, watercolor studies, demonstration models, and paintings “made by my father-in-law [Abbott Thayer] is his study of protective coloration in the animal kingdom.”

Sources

Abbott Handerson Thayer andThayer Family Papers at the website of the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution), Research Collections (includes 10,074 online image and document scans, with numerous letters and other materials pertaining to David Reasoner).

“Alumni Notes” (David Reasoner entry), in Indiana University Alumni Quarterly. Vol 8 No 4, October 1921, p. 528.

Ross Anderson, Abbott Handerson Thayer. Exhibition catalog. Syracuse, New York: Everson Museum, 1982.

“Artist Discovers Rare Self-Portrait by Thayer,” in The Kingston Daily Freeman (Kingston, New York). December 14, 1948, pp. 1 and 17.

Roy R. Behrens, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art,Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009.

“Gladys Reasoner to Hold Exhibition,” in The Kingston Daily Freeman, July 25, 1932, p. 6. 

Nelson C. White, Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and Naturalist. Hartford: Connecticut Printers, 1951.   

***

Abbott Thayer and Concealing Coloration / Dublin NH

Above Abbott Handerson Thayer, Charcoal drawing for ship camouflage experiment, c1915. From Abbott Handerson Thayer Family Collection. 

•••

Excerpted from L.W. Leonard and J.L. Seward, The History of Dublin NH. Published by the Town of Dublin, 1920, pp. 684-686—

Throughout the world the word “camouflage” has become familiar during the war. Although this word is of French origin, the thing itself is primarily an American creation, the work neither of warriors nor army experts, but of a distinguished artist, a well-known Dublin resident, Abbott H. Thayer, who has permanently lived here for more than twenty-five years.

In 1896, an essay by Mr. Thayer on “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration,” was published in The Auk, and shortly afterwards reprinted in the Year Book of the  Smithsonian Institution. In 1909, the Macmillans published Concealing-coloration in the Animal Kingdom, written by Abbott H. Thayer’s son, Gerald H. Thayer, and illustrated by father and son.

Protective coloration, as set forth in this book, was one of the main starting points of camouflage, and to a considerable extent has guided its development. Assurance of these facts were given Mr. Thayer in England and Scotland in the winter of 1915-16, when he went abroad to tender the Allies’ more direct help in this matter.

Professor [Sir William Abbott] Herdman of the University of Liverpool, suggested that the naturalists of Great Britain ought to sign a joint statement to the effect that they believed Mr. Thayer’s unique knowledge of protective coloration could be made of the greatest use to the War Department. It proved, however, that, owing to the efforts of several other British scientists, notably Professor J. Graham Kerr of Cambridge and the University of Glasgow, who had even urged that the government create a special bureau for the adoption of Thayer’s discoveries, “concealing coloration” was already doing war service of various kinds, both on land and sea.
 
Camouflage has carried the principles of visual deception to hitherto undreamed-of lengths of application, and to manifold and divergent new developments.

But the latest military camouflage was mainly a matter of masking batteries and guns for airplane detection. Standardized materials, wire netting, colored shreds of burlap, etc., manufactured in vast quantities behind the lines were the main dependence for this roofing-over and screening of guns. The latest marine camouflage, again, sought not concealment of ships, but effects of distortion of outline and perspective which would puzzle the U-boat observers looking through the periscope, as to the vessel’s speed, distance, exact form, and especially her course, or direction of movement.
 
Professor E. B. Poulton, F. R. S., etc., President of the Linnean Society of London, the distinguished English evolutionist, writes as follows:

“During the sixty years which have elapsed since the historic day [of the reading before the Linnean Society of Darwin’s and Wallace’s joint essay on Natural Selection], English-speaking workers—among the foremost the American artist-naturalist, Abbott H. Thayer, and his son Gerald H. Thayer—have studied this principle [protective coloration], continually extending it by the discovery of fresh applications, and analysing it into a whole group of cooperating principles; but inspite of all these naturalists have done, it required the Great War and a misused French word in order to arrest the attention of their fellow-countrymen…

We may, however, forgive the inccurate use of a new word which the war has bought into our language because of the attention which has now been focused upon a most interesting subject—attention which rightly demands a new and widely accessible edition of this work [Thayers’ Concealing Coloration]. Here are clearly explained and illustrated the principles underlying the art of camouflage, practiced by nature from time immemorial but in some of its main lines only made known to man by the discoveries of Abbott H. Thayer.”

Abbott Thayer and Background-Picturing

Background-picturing experiment with G.H. Thayer painting

Above Roy R. Behrens (©2015), an experiment using Adobe Photoshop software in an attempt to replicate a camouflage effect that artist/naturalists Abbott Handerson Thayer and Gerald Handerson Thayer (father and son) referred to as background picturing. The initial illustration (top left) is a watercolor painting by Gerald Thayer that was originally reproduced in Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). The actual painting is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

•••

The following is an excerpt (in reference to the image above) from an as-yet unpublished essay by Roy R. Behrens, titled "Seeing Through Camouflage: Abbott Thayer, Background-Picturing and the Use of Cut-Out Silhouettes" (©2015)—

Years ago, I published an article in which I suggested that Abbott Thayer had anticipated a computer-based method of working on multiple solutions to the same art or design composition, by which we use the SaveAs command on computers.• In drafting this article, it occurred to me that he may also have anticipated another digital practice, as suggested by background-picturing. This can best be understood by looking at a series of illustrations.

The first of these illustrations is an unaltered reproduction of a watercolor painting by Gerald Thayer, titled Male Ruffed Grouse in Forest [top left]. First published in full-color in in 1909 in Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, it is a masterful demonstration of the intricacies of background-picturing, or (figuratively speaking) of “seeing through” an animal as if it were transparent. In the next two illustrations, the woodland setting [top right] and the bird [bottom left] have been selected and removed, using Adobe Photoshop. In the final stage [bottom right], I have instructed the software to fill the empty silhouette of the bird, using a setting of ContentAware, based on information in the shapes and colors in the background. The result is surely successful, albeit less than equivalent to what the Thayers intended, since the source of this solution is a single particular background and not, as they hypothesized, an average of “innumerable landscapes.”

• See R.R. Behrens, “Abbott H. Thayer’s anticipation of a computer-based method of working” in Leonardo. Vol 34 No 1 (2001), pp. 19-20. Available online here. See also www.AbbottThayer.com and "Abbott H. Thayer's Vanishing Ducks."

Countershading | Thayer's Disappearing Ducks

from MAS Context (Summer 2014)

We have featured earlier posts about American artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer’s use of wooden duck decoys to demonstrate countershading. Additional information continues to surface almost daily. Some of this is detailed in an essay in the Summer 2014 issue of a Chicago-based design and architecture magazine called MAS Context. Here’s the link to the free online version, with the title page above. Other discoveries are below.

•••

Barry Faulkner, Barry Faulkner: Sketches from an Artist’s Life. Dublin NH: William L. Bauhan, 1973, p. 18—

My first vivid memory of [his cousin] Abbott Thayer recalls him crouching in the dust of School Street, demonstrating to Mrs. Weeks, our teacher of drawing in the public schools, his newly evolved theory of Obliterative Gradation, or Protective Coloration—the foundations of his discovery of why birds and animals are difficult to see against their natural background.

The demonstration consisted of two small wooden ducks, mounted on wires, both painted the color of the dirt on which they stood, representing for the moment a natural background. One duck stood out solid and rotund, but the other Thayer had painted darker on its back and lighter on its belly until it had no more solidity than a cobweb. Suddenly a frightened cat bounded between Thayer’s legs, avoided the ungraded duck and dashed into and knocked over the duck it couldn’t see.  Cousin Abbott was as happy as a child at the cat’s vindication of his theory. Mrs. Weeks was entertained, if not enlightened.

•••

George Palmer Putnam, Wide Margins: A Publisher’s Autobiography. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. 1942, p. 33—

We who were at Dublin [NH, where Abbott Thayer lived] were forever having first-hand lessons in protective coloring. Perhaps it would be dummies of birds set out in conspicuous places. Some were painted as in actual life, their upper parts dark, light below. Others had this reversed, with dark breasts and bottoms, and light backs. Those concocted in nature's way flattened amazingly against any routine background; the light below and the dark above, counteracting shadow and brilliance, made flat planes. These visual decoys we'd constantly trip over. But the others, where nature's process was reversed, stood out brutally in any environment.

•••

Mary Fuertes Boynton, ed., Louis Agassiz Fuertes: His Life Briiefly Told and His Correspondence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 119—

[The Thayers’ book, Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom] is weakened only by its tone…and by the ambiguity of some, and prominence of others, of the illustrations. For example, in the photographs of models used to display the effect of countershading, the shaded model disappears so completely that you cannot believe it was ever there in the first place; an altered or falsified picture would have been more persuasive.

•••

Fabian, “The Bushlover” in The Brisbane Courier (Queensland AU), October 9, 1926, p. 18—

An interesting experiment was made a short time ago at the British Museum of Natural History to demonstrate the great advantage of Nature’s commonest color arrangement among living creatures. Most of us have noticed that the great majority of animals are colored darker above and lighter below, and this is true, not only of nearly all our marsupials, but of most of the native birds as well. The rule holds good, too, in the case of fish, and, as more light comes from above than from below, the desired result is that the average fish in water becomes almost transparent and invisible. The British Museum experiment was carried out by Mr. [Abbott] Thayer, of America. He lined a large square box with gray flannel and placed in it two bird models, which were fastened to a rod running through the middle of the box. Both of these were covered with flannel, cut from the same material as that used to line the box, but one was painted dark above and white below, while the other was left in its plain gray. To the surprise of many observers the uncolored bird was decidedly the more conspicuous, and it was stated that at a few yards’ distance the painted bird, by counteracting the normal light and shade, was almost invisible. In Australia this color scheme for birds is a very common one. It is worth noting also that our really brilliant birds are almost always those of the dense shrubs, where protection is comparatively easy, while the birds of the plains and the open grassy spaces are far more protectively colored.

•••

Roger Pocock, “The Art of Concealment: Devices on Land and Sea” in The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania) January 3, 1918, p. 6—

On the permanent staff of the Natural History Museum in London, there are two little wooden ducks…They are dressed in gray flannel, and each housed in a glass case with a gray flannel background. No. 1 duck is dressed in a plain gray flannel, and you can see her plainly at a hundred yards, because of the dark shadows cast by her neck and body, as well as by the brightness of her back. No. 2 duck is slightly whitened underneath to counteract the shadows, and slightly bronzed on top to counteract the light. Even at six feet the showcase appears to be empty. There is no sign of a duck. No hawk, no fox, no sportsman with a scatter gun and a small dog could possibly discover or kill the invisible duck unless she moved or made foolish quacks to guide her enemies. A great many years ago I wrote to Lords of the [British] Admiralty imploring them to go and see the invisible duck who could teach them priceless lessons in the art of concealing battleships and cruisers…

•••

James Devaney, “Nature Notes: An Experiment” in The Northern Miner (Charters Towers, Queensland AU), June 5, 1935, p. 4—

To illustrate just what it is which makes some birds hard to see, an interesting experiment was carried out by the American painter Abbott Thayer, who was also a keen Nature student. He wanted to prove how the darker back and lighter belly is a color scheme which tends to make birds less visible, so he made two wooden ducks as models. These he seated in a box on a perch, and both the interior of the box and the wooden ducks themselves were covered with brownish flannel. The ducks, exactly the same hue as their surroundings, were still plainly visible at a good distance. Then the experimenter [Abbott Thayer], who had an artist’s knowledge of color values, took his brushes and darkened the back of one and painted its under surface a whitish color. That particular duck then escaped notice at a little distance, and was absolutely invisible at about twelve feet, while the other one was very plain. Thayer carried out other experiments with imitation insects to show how Mother Nature gets her camouflage effects.

Randolph Bourne, Abbott Thayer, and pandemic flu

Randolph Bourne

At the end of World War I, there was a major flu pandemic that began in January 1918 and continued to December 1920. About 500 million people were infected worldwide, about a quarter of the planet's population then. Of those, the death toll is uncertain but it may have been as many as 100 million.

In my lifetime, I have either known personally or have heard the stories about children who were orphaned when their parents died in that pandemic. Two of those children, for example, were the writer Mary McCarthy (author of The Group and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood) and her brother Kevin McCarthy, who became a Hollywood actor.

Another prominent person who died in that pandemic was a radical American writer and intellectual named Randolph Bourne (1886-1918). Bourne was well-known for his provocative essays about societal reform. But, in advance of that, he himself was socially conspicuous because of his physical deformity, part of which occurred at birth. During his delivery, forceps were used improperly and the umbilical cord was wrapped around his left ear, leaving that ear jutting out and that side of his profile distorted. Tragically, four years later, he was struck by tuberculosis of the spine, which stunted his growth, leaving him hunchbacked and dwarfish for life.

Despite such disabilities, Bourne went on to study at Columbia University, where he earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and where he was greatly influenced by philosopher John Dewey. He then spent time in Europe but returned in 1914 just as World War I began. In the remaining few years of his life, he was a contributing writer to various progressive magazines, including The New Republic and The Seven Arts.

At some point, perhaps in the summer of 1915, he asked a friend if she knew of “any attractive place in New England where one might go with the expectation of meeting somebody interesting?” She suggested Dublin NH, and arranged for a cabin in which he could stay. Once there, Bourne reported that he’d found “people of quick roving intelligence who carry their learning lightly,” and even better, those “who use their learning as fuel to warm them into sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men.” Among those he befriended were the families of Abbott Handerson Thayer (the “father of camouflage,” George de Forest Brush, and Raphael Pumpelly (whose daughters were the models for some of Thayer’s finest paintings).

Dublin NH (1906)

He also met Amy Lowell, who often spent summers in Dublin. According to Van Wyck Brooks (in Fenollosa and His Circle, With Other Essays in Biography), when Bourne dined at Lowell’s home, she “walked up to him as one of the oldest of friends and they had a truly grand gossip. She was surprisingly fair-minded and a lover of all sorts of queer and little people whom she touched off inimitably…” But she later had a change of mind, and, after a subsequent meeting, she told a friend that Bourne was a “weakling” whose physical deformity was evident in his “twisted mentality and tortured [writing] style.” “Everything he writes,” she said, “shows he is a cripple.”

Bourne was especially drawn to Abbott Thayer, whom he described as “a winsome and Emersonian old person.” About the artist’s family, he described how they live “in the woods, in a romantic warren of studios and big low rough rooms, with great fireplaces, and windows that frame delicious pictures of pine trees and mountain and sunset. [The Thayer family, he wrote] are all such charming, simple wistful, unworldly people, with whom you can sit silently before the fire and know you understand them.”

As reported by Brooks, during the summer that Bourne lived in Dublin, Thayer was (inevitably) preoccupied with Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, the book that he and his son Gerald H. Thayer had first produced in 1909 (it would later be reissued in 1919) “on protective coloration, which was so useful in the war, and he showed Randolph and [his friend] Fergus his color diagrams and demonstrations and told a great many stories.” The US had not yet entered the war, but Thayer was determined to share his wartime proposals on camouflage with the British.

Music was central to the Thayers’ daily life, and on one summer evening, Abbott brought out from storage an antique German piano (probably the one that had been shipped in the "piano box" that we described in an earlier posting) and combining that with a violin, the family and their guests enjoyed singing lieder songs by Schubert for an hour. As Bourne himself later described it:

Mr. Thayer’s appreciation was almost embarrassingly ecstatic, and he proferred sketches and dinners and thanks if we would come two or three times a week and do it again. I liked his simple emotional ways and his telling us we had “watered his soul.” He took us down to the road with the quaintest of lanterns and spoke constantly of the music.

Still, Thayer’s focus on camouflage, and his efforts to convince the world of the rightness of his theories was always at the forefront. As Bourne wrote to one of his friends—

Mr. Thayer’s head was so full of piebald warships and the conversion of college presidents to protective coloration that he couldn’t any longer let his emotional nature be stirred by our Schubert and Bach.

For whatever reason, the Thayer friendship did not last. While Bourne considered the option of buying a house in Dublin, and becoming a permanent resident there, Thayer stopped short of suggesting even another summer visit. Bourne’s visits, recalled Van Wyck Brooks, “were too exciting for Abbott Thayer, and, as Randolph said, ‘I talk too much.’”

Nevertheless, some distant contact still remained, and—

…when Mr. Thayer’s daughter Gladys came to New York, Rudolph offered to find a studio for her. She had just marched in a suffrage parade in Boston, led by what she called "a hag-like lady in regal dress of brocade, riding on a black steed just in front of us…Seeing the prim red-nosed antis with their unbearably smug and pampered demeanor I felt once and for all which was the great and human side and the lines of progress.”

In December 1918, Bourne fell victim to the flu epidemic and died that month. He was only thirty-two. He was buried in Bloomfield NJ (his birthplace) on—

a dreary day with a cold rain falling. The Abbott Thayers came to the funeral with others of his older friends; and Norman Thomas,* at the time a clergyman, conducted the service. Lewis Mumford wrote, a little later, "Randolph Bourne was precious to us because of what he was rather than because of what he had actually written."

•••

* One of the most memorable events of my life took place on May 17, 1967, when (as a student) I attended a talk by American Socialist Norman Thomas in the Auditorium at the University of Northern Iowa (then the State College of Iowa). What a courageous man and a powerful speaker. He was 83 when he spoke, and would die at the close of the following year.

Aaron Hegert | Thayer's Concealing Coloration

Gerald H. Thayer (c1909), Male Ruffed Grouse in Forest

When the first edition of Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom was published in 1909, the author of record was artist-naturalist Gerald H. Thayer. His father Abbott H. Thayer wrote the introduction, while also contributing heavily to every aspect of the book, which bore as its subtitle An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern: Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Discoveries.

Among the Thayers’ closest friends was the naturalist and wildlife artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes. In 1956, Fuertes’ daughter, Mary Fuertes Boynton•, recalled that Abbott Thayer “wanted people to see for themselves what he had discovered…He was constantly devising new means of persuasion: placing woodpecker skins upon photos of trees against sky, hanging papier-maché models of patterned oryx heads in trees, taking people into the wood to look for themselves at a mounted peacock concealed in bright sunlight” (p. 128).

Of the many persuasive images in Concealing Coloration, few are as accomplished as a small, intricate watercolor painting (reproduced facing p. 38) by the book’s author, the younger Thayer, of a Male Ruffed Grouse in the Forest. It epitomized what the Thayers believed was the only legitimate option for bird artists—the immersion of the subject in its natural setting, most easily accomplished by (in Abbott’s words) “making a background wholly out of the bird’s colors” (Boynton, p. 214). This led to painful letters between the Thayers and a distraught Fuertes, with the latter being pressured by publishers to paint clearly identifiable birds (in the subsequent handbook tradition), free of the clutter of backgrounds.

Gerald Thayer’s ruffed grouse painting, wrote Fuertes’ daughter, “is a wonderful work of art, perhaps greater than anything Louis ever did. He took six months to paint it (he painted very few pictures at all), and he never made that adjustment to the world that would insure a normal means of earning a living for his family. The advice he gave Louis was good, but Louis could not take it and live…[Abbott Thayer] made an Eden for his children that was not of the world, worldly, yet he left them ill equipped to live with that world, and without the financial means that would enable them to live without it” (p. 217).

Photos of mimetic holes (1909), Concealing Coloration

In a later section of Concealing Coloration, there is a wonderfully curious page [above] comprised of what the Thayers describe as “Bits of animals’ patterns, all representing holes… Among these are mingled reproductions of actual holes to show how close is the resemblance” (p. 159).

I was reminded of these pages from the Thayers' book when I was recently made aware of the work of Aaron Hegert, an American photographer who teaches at Whittier College in CA. Motivated in part by his interest in the Thayer demonstrations, Hegert has produced a camouflage-themed limited edition book (called Action, Time and Vision) of photographs and photographic experiments, some of which are “take-offs” on the images in Concealing Coloration. Of those, I was especially struck by a page spread [below] in which he has juxtaposed the two pages discussed in this blog post, the page of photographs of holes and his interesting revisionist look at Gerald Thayer’s ruffed grouse painting, in which the subject is even more greatly obscured by bringing in bits of the background.

Aaron Hegert (2014), spread from Action, Time and Vision

A selection of Hegert’s images are available online as is a preview of the book.

• See Mary Fuertes Boynton, Louis Agassiz Fuertes: His Life Briefly Told and His Correspondence (NY: Oxford University Press, 1956).

Abbott Handerson Thayer / the master at his very best

Abbott H. Thayer (c1915)

Above Abbott Handerson Thayer, Study of Alma Wollerman, oil on canvas, c1915. From Abbott Handerson Thayer Family Collection. Thayer made a number of paintings of Alma Wollerman Thayer (his daughter-in-law as of 1911, wife of Gerald H. Thayer), but surely this must be the finest. This is the elder Thayer at his best.

•••

Ernest Henderson, The World of “Mr. Sheraton.” New York: Popular Library, 1962, pp. 82-83—

Another Dublin [NH] resident was the artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, considered by many the discoverer of protective coloration. While still in my teens, I saw a demonstration of his skill. He had produced a piece of stone carved to resemble a duck. Painted to match the roadway, the object had a dark brown back, with much lighter colors on its belly.

In broad daylight Thayer placed the duck, supported by a stiff wire, in the roadway and led me twenty paces away. Turning, I was sure the object had vanished; nothing was visible at all. A few paces nearer, and the wire could be seen—absolutely nothing else. Another few paces, and the duck began to take form. Yes, Abbott Thayer had indeed mastered nature’s private secret for deceiving the human eye.

Important Thayer Camouflage Exhibit

Title slide of talk at National Sporting Library & Museum

What a weekend it was. Mary and I have just returned from a quick trip to Washington DC, to attend an exhibition called Abbott Handerson Thayer: A Beautiful Law of Nature, on view now through May 26, 2013, at the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg VA. It is a "must see" installation for anyone with an interest in this turn-of-the-century master, whose early revelations about protective coloration in animals led to his being referred to as the "father of camouflage." Although a comparatively small selection (there are two rooms filled with original work), it is an undoubtedly groundbreaking event, in part because it focuses on his contributions to camouflage, and because so very few of these works have ever been on public view.

This exhibit came about through the collaborative efforts of the Curator of the NSL Museum Claudia Pfeiffer (whose efficiency was astonishing), the Gold Leaf Studios (framing expert William Adair and his able associate Ari Post), and the Abbott H. Thayer Estate and Family.

(l-r) Claudia Pfeiffer, Roy Behrens and Ari Post

Above is a photograph of (l to r) Claudia, myself and Ari discussing aspects of the installation. In addition to seeing Thayer's work (most of which I myself had never seen reproductions of, much less the genuine pieces), along with other works of art in concurrent exhibitions there, I was privileged to speak about "Abbott H. Thayer and the Uncloaking of Camouflage" on Saturday.

In an earlier blog post, I have already shared information about the contents and availability of Gold Leaf Studio's full-color exhibition catalog, which reproduces many of the works, and is supplemented by exhibition essays by UK zoologist Martin Stevens, American art historian William Kloss, myself, and Ari Post.

(l-r) Jean Reasoner Plunket, John Plunket and Roy Behrens

The exhibition and lecture opportunity were reason enough to make this a pleasurable, memorable journey. But there were two other highlights as well: First, we were able to spend several hours with owner Bill Adair at the Gold Leaf Studios, whose working space and cache of historic surprises were both eye-popping and mind-boggling (we could easily have snooped around for a entire week). And then (and this I'll never forget) we had the unexpected luck to be able to visit briefly with Abbott Thayer's granddaughter (portrait artist Jean Reasoner Plunket). Although we had never met, she and I had "co-starred" in the only film on Thayer's life, titled Invisible: Abbott Thayer and the Art of Camouflage. This delightful meeting was arranged by her son, Thayer's great-grandson, John Plunket, with whom we were able to talk extensively.

What a whirlwind trip it was. I am exhausted—if pleasantly so.

Camouflage Artist | Gerome Brush

Sherry Fry, Portrait Bust of Gerome Brush (c1910)

Gerome Brush (informally referred to as “Gerry” or “Jerry”) was born in New York on March 11, 1888. His father was a well-known American painter, George de Forest Brush, while his mother, Mittie Taylor Brush, was a sculptor, inventor and pioneering aviator. He is sometimes mistakenly cited as “Jerome” Brush, but his actual name was Gerome, a tribute to French painter Jean-Léon Gérome, his father’s famous teacher at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts. 

Much of what is known about Brush and his family members, as well as others who were part of the artists colony in Dublin, New Hamphire (where the family spent their summers), is due to the efforts of his sister, Nancy Douglas Bowditch (née Nancy Brush), who wrote a memoir of her father, titled George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter (1970). Later, she also donated her papers to the Archives of American Art, including two interviews in which she talked at length about her parents, her siblings, friends and others. 

Gerome Brush learned about painting and sculpture from his father, and by working with others in Europe and the US. Among his early influences was the painter Abbott Handerson Thayer, who was a lifelong friend of his father, as well as their neighbor in Dublin. Although somewhat younger, Gerome was in close contact with other young artists who studied and lived in the vicinity of Dublin, Keene and Cornish (location of the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens), New Hampshire, among them muralist Barry Faulkner, sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry, and painter-naturalist Gerald Thayer (Abbott Thayer’s son). Bird artist and naturalist Louis Agassiz Fuertes (a Thayer student and devotee) was a frequent and favorite visitor to the Brush family’s summer home. 

In Dublin, among the Brushes’ neighbors was Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), whose youngest daughter Jean was prone to terrible seizures. Among Jean Clemens’ closest friends was Nancy Brush, and entries from Jean’s diary from 1906 confirm her romantic interest in Gerome Brush. But nothing came of it, and three years later, while no longer living in Dublin, Jean died, apparently during a seizure, while taking a bath. 

In the early 1890s, Abbott Thayer had begun to write about the survival advantage of protective coloration (or animal camouflage), and in 1898, coincident with the Spanish-American War, he and George de Forest Brush approached the US Navy with a proposal for camouflaging ships. Apparently precocious, the young Gerome Brush was also involved in this research, and in 1902, at the age of only fourteen, he and Abbott Thayer were jointly granted a patent for a “Process of Treating the Outside of Ships, etc., For Making Them Less Visible” (U.S. Patent No. 715013). The Spanish-American War having ended in 1898, the same year it began, there was no on-going conflict, and camouflage was not an urgent concern. 

In 1913, Gerome Brush married a New York actress named Louise Seymour. According to his sister Nancy, Gerome “who was beginning to make a name for himself as a sculptor, had also become interested in working at a settlement house there [in New York]—coaching boys in a dramatic club—and thus he met Louise, who was occupied in the same work.” In celebration of the marriage, Gerome’s parents took the newlywed couple and the Brushes’ several daughters (with the exception of Nancy) to Europe for an extended visit, and particularly to Florence, Italy. They left in November 1913 and lived overseas for nearly a year, but they had to return to the US in October 1914, because of the increasing dangers of World War I. 

On their return voyage, among their fellow passengers (according to Nancy Brush) “were Enrico Caruso and some of the Metropolitan Opera Company. They were full of fun and kept all the others so entertained that they didn’t have time to think about the danger [of being attacked]. They sang and played tricks on each other and had games together like so many gay children. One day Mother [Mittie Taylor Brush] looked up in surprise at her cabin window to see peering in at her the beaming face of Caruso with a lady’s hat on.

The following month, the New York Times reported that the great Caruso had dropped in at the Knoedler Galleries, to purchase an exquisite portrait that Gerome Brush had painted of his beautiful wife Louise. 

It was not until 1917 that the US entered World War I, joining the side of the Allies. Given the astonishing success with which British ships were being sunk by German submarines (called U-boats), the question of making Allied merchant ships less visible (or at least harder to target) became a paramount issue. American artists and others were encouraged to submit proposals for ship camouflage, and Gerome Brush was among those who responded.

Gerome Brush camouflage plan (not based on countershading)

In late 1917, the US Navy (working with the US Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation) officially gave its approval to six ship camouflage systems, named after their originators, including (artists) Gerome Brush, William Andrew MacKay, Lewis Herzog, Everett L. Warner, F.M. Watson, and (chemist) Maximillian Toch. For the rest of the war, according to Nancy Brush, her brother Gerome (along with other artists) was involved in supervising “the painting of merchant ships all along the eastern seaboard. He worked at Norfolk, Virginia, Boston Harbor, New York Harbor, and many other places. He trained men to do the painting according to Mr. [Abbott] Thayer’s theory [of countershading, in which] the color scheme for the ships was taken from the general coloring of a seagull, worked in two shades of gray and pure white, the underpart of everything being white.” 

In 1919, Gerome Brush was granted a second patent for ship camouflage, titled “System for Reducing the Visibility of Objects” (US Patent No. 1296753). His interest in camouflage evidently continued after the war, or perhaps it was rekindled by World War II, because in 1943, he was granted a third patent related to ship camouflage, titled “Method for Preventing Wake Formation” (US Patent 2414632). 

After WWI, Brush’s career as an artist can only have declined. Surely, his artwork (like that of his pre-Modern parents and friends) was all but dismissed as outmoded. As his parents aged, Gerome and his wife made increased visits to their home, in part because Louise was preparing a book about his father’s life. Unfortunately, in 1937, his father’s studio, artworks, papers and other irreplaceable artifacts (including Louise’s manuscript) were destroyed in a fire. 

Eventually, Gerome and Louise Brush moved away from Dublin (although their gravestones are located there) and settled in Brookline, Massachusetts. He appears to have painted portraits, sculpted portrait busts, and created murals for the Children’s Hospital in Boston. In the 1930s, he made detailed charcoal portraits of 109 members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1936, these were published as a book, titled The Boston Symphony Orchestra: Charcoal Drawings of Its Members with Biographical Sketches. In a foreword by Edward Weeks, his process is described as follows: “Each musician sat for him in the little room that houses the Casadesus Collection [of historic musical instruments]; each played for him a solo in order to banish the last vestige of self-consciousness, and from each he has drawn comments, bits of personal history, and the gleam of aspirations which are characteristic.” 

Gerome Brush died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on September 13, 1954.

Sources

Behrens, Roy R., False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2002.

_______, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research in Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009.

_______, ed. Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2012.

Bowditch, Nancy Douglas, George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter. Peterborough, New Hampshire: William L. Bauhan, 1970.

Brush, Gerome, The Boston Symphony Orchestra: Charcoal Drawings of Its Members with Biographical Sketches. Boston: Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1936.

“Caruso Buys Painting” in New York Times. November 25, 1914.

“Gerome Brush” (obituary) in New York Times. September 15, 1954, p. 33.

Lystra, Karen, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

© Roy R. Behrens

book sources & historic prints & photographs