John Downes Whiting / American ship camoufleur

For years I’ve been trying to find out about an American artist, author and book illustrator named John Downes Whiting (1884-1977). I’ve been looking for information about his activities as a ship camouflage designer during World War I. One complication is that he is often cited as John D. Whiting, so it’s easy to confuse him with another person named John David Whiting (1882-1951), who belonged to a religious sect in Jerusalem called The American Colony.

In contrast, John Downes Whiting (known as Jack Whiting) was, as he described himself, a “Connecticut Yankee” and a graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts (BFA 1915). Born in Ridgefield CT, he was named after his uncle, John Ireland Howe Downes (1861-1933), who was also an artist, a Yale graduate, and the librarian for the art school there for 23 years.

As an artist, Jack Whiting’s own profession was that of a book and magazine illustrator, but he wrote books as well. In 1920, he published Practical Illustration: A Guide for Artists (see cover above), and in 1928, he wrote and illustrated a semi-fictionalized account of his experience during WWI, titled Convoy: A Story of the War at Sea.

On his draft registration form, dated September 5, 1918, he lists his occupation as a “camoufleur” with the US Shipping Board, at 345 East 33rd Street in New York. That is the street address of the studio of a prominent muralist and interior designer named William Andrew Mackay, whom I’ve been writing about for years. We have blogged about Mackay’s contribution to ship camouflage, and have also published an essay on Mackay, his ship camouflage proposals, and his school for camoufleurs, headquartered at his studio, which he called the Mackay School of Camouflage.

According to biographical entries, Whiting joined the Connecticut National Guard in 1917, where he served in Company F of the 2nd Regiment for one year. From June through December of 1918, he was affiliated with Mackay’s team of camouflage artists, who were assigned to develop so-called “dazzle camouflage” schemes for US merchant ships. They were not strictly a part of the US Navy, but were affiliated with the civilian Shipping Board, which was responsible for applying the schemes to merchant ships in the harbors.

As Mackay himself described it, it was at his Manhattan studio—

that the first work of camouflage was developed. In all, 749 vessels were camouflaged, and sixty men, artists, architects and designers, made this shop their headquarters, under direction of the United States Shipping Board, working over designs, testing colors, peering through the periscope at the wooden models, and then dashing off to try out some few effect on the vessels that, in a few days, would be depending upon our skill in the art of disguise to save them from the U-boats.

I have a list of the names of sixty-four (not sixty) of Mackay’s camouflage school affiliates. All this is more or less confirmed by a review of John Downes Whiting’s book on Practical Illustration that appeared in The Daily Northwestern (Evanston IL) on January 22, 1921, p. 7. The book’s author, the reviewer states—

…served in the camouflage department of the navy during the war. One of Mr. Whiting’s assignments was to find out just what lines and colors did in reducing the visibility of ships. The results of his experiments, conducted at sea and on the coast, formed the basis of many of the weird but efficacious desgns which camouflaged our transports. William Andrew Mackay, the mural painter, with whom Mr. Whiting worked for the navy, says that Whiting’s book is written in the same thorough manner in which the author tackled his war work.

In 1928, when Whiting wrote a semi-fictionalized account of his wartime experience in Convoy: A Story of the War at Sea, it included an entire chapter about Mackay and his camouflage school. It also features a pen-and-ink drawing by Whiting (reproduced above) of a ship camoufleur looking at a camouflaged ship model in a testing theatre. In a different later source (from a 1932 issue of The Literary Digest), Whiting states that during the war he designed “camouflage for Army transports and supply ships.” In that case, it seems likely that he also worked with Frederick A. Pawla (1876-1964), who, as the head camouflage for the AEF Embarkation Service, oversaw the camouflage of “many of the army transports, particularly cargo carriers.” We have previously blogged about Pawla here and here.

On page 242 of Whiting’s book titled Convoy, there is an offhand reference to ship camouflage which may be relevant, or maybe not. The sentence reads: “The Monodoc, looking, in her camouflage, like an intoxicated snake, lay at anchor in the river.” The book’s text, as mentioned earlier is a book of fiction, based on fact. So perhaps we shouldn’t surprised that there doesn’t seem to have been a WWI American ship named Monodoc (altought there were ships named Monadnock). Maybe he simply invented the name.

In the same book, on page 80, Whiting provides some insight into an on-going conflict between Mackay’s camouflage team (affilidated with the US Shipping Board) and the US Navy’s own official Camouflage Section, which had been given the authority to originate all ship camouflage schemes, both Navy and civilian, which was greatly resented by those who were loyal to Mackay.

As Whiting alludes to in his book, Mackay’s camouflage school may not have been unauthorized by the Navy, and was thus conducted “quietly.” But, as he also implies, Mackay’s men also side-stepped strict compliance with the Navy’s regulations by claiming that the schemes that they were given required alteration to make them fit the vessels they were required to apply them to.

Here is the dialogue from Whiting’s book—

“I thought these [ship camouflage] designs were made in Washington, under the Navy Department.”

“Yep, that’s the theory. Those Johnnies think we only put their patterns on the steamers, but, b-bless you, the plans we get from there only fit half the shapes in this town. We have to camouflage every darned thing from a tanker to a barge.”

“And so your chief [William Andrew Mackay] is quietly evolving his own school for camoufleurs?”

“That’s it. The queerist lot of wights are working here, scraped up from the corners of Bohemia. But they work; Mackay is a hustler.”

“Drives you, does he?”

“No, he innoculates us; he has more ideas than all your admirals put together. And the boys are simply nuts about him.”

A small selection of other illustrations by Whiting, including book covers and an interior illustrations, are also featured in this post.

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

William Andrew Mackay and Optical Camouflage

Early in World War I, American muralist William Andrew Mackay used a spinning, colored Maxwell disk (Invented by James Clark Maxwell) to produce an optical mixture of gray that he argued would be more effective than battleship gray as "low visibility" ship camouflage paint. His efforts are reported as follows in a chapter on "Marine Camouflage" in Benedict Crowell, How America Went to War: The Road to France. Vol 3. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921, pp. 496-498—

In the spring of 1917 Mr. William Andrew Mackay, a New York artist, brought to Washington a little machine for spinning various colored discs. At an interested meeting of the Navy Consulting Board he placed on this machine a disc, the sectors of which were colored successively red, violet, and green in fixed proportions. He spun the disc, and it thereupon blurred into a gray as nearly identical with that of a sea horizon as human vision could register. Then, placing on the machine a disc of alternately green and violet sectors, properly proportioned, he spun it, and the result was the blue of sea water. Then he expounded his theory.

He opposed paint designs which brought in white or gray, on the ground that these colors do not actually appear in nature in the traveled latitudes of the Atlantic; they appear only in effect. He ruled out battleship gray on the ground that it gives off a reflected color, and is not an original source of color waves. The horizon background behind it, on the other hand, is kinetic in its effect upon the optic nerve; and therefore the gray ship, even if its paint reproduce the horizon color exactly, will always appear distinct against the horizon. He analyzed the horizon light itself into its primary colors and proposed to mingle those colors in a painted pattern the component colors of which would merge in the distance and become themselves a kinetic source of radiation of the desired shade. He declared that a ship so painted—painted with pigment light, as it were—would tend to merge completely into the marine background.

The Mackay system was applied to many ships. It was the forerunner of numerous similar systems devised by artists who were studying the spectrum composition of light and applying their theories in various stripe and stipple patterns. One of these men was Mr. Louis Herzog, an artist of New York, whose system combined quarter shading and primary colors. Dr. Maximilian Toch, an artist and paint manufacturer of New York, devised another invisibility system based on studies of the spectrum.

As the Mackay system developed, it came to consist mainly of block patterns of primary colors. The color blocks possessed sharp outlines and were arranged in cubist fashion on what the artist called the rupture principle. He usually divided a vessel into large masses of contrasting color tones, in order to cause one or another of the large portions of the vessel to be invisible and to leave other parts visible, but showing a contour quite unlike that of a ship.

Mr. Mackay worked at the Norfolk Navy Yard, where painters under his direction experimentally camouflaged the yacht Legonia II, several fishing steamers, and a motor boat. One of the fishing boats, the M.M. Davis, was sent to sea on September 4, 1917, for observation. The reports made by practical mariners were, as usual, conflicting. One navy officer at Norfolk stated that, day in and day out, the Davis was more visible to him than ships painted the standard gray. On the other hand, the commander of the battleship Ohio observed the Davis and reported that her painting scheme was far superior to the gray of the warships.

About this time Mackay camouflage demonstrated its effectiveness in an unexpected way. One of the ships which the Mackay organization painted was the American liner Philadelphia. In October, 1917, while the Philadelphia was about 400 miles off the American coast proceeding to Europe, she sighted a mysterious freighter and, suspecting a submarine trap, ran up code flags demanding the vessel's identity. The cargo ship did not reply, and the Philadelphia fired a shot across her bows. At once the freighter hoisted the Swedish flag, and her master apologized, saying that he had failed to observe the liner in her camouflage coat. On this same voyage an American destroyer lost the Philadelphia on a bright moonlight night and could not find her until dawn. In November one of our troop transports, the President Grant, observed a cargo ship at sea camouflaged by the Mackay system. The commander of the Grant reported afterwards that his lookout did not see the cargo ship at all until she was only a mile away, and then she looked like a moving bit of horizon in which the masts furnished the clue. The consensus of opinion was that Mackay ships merged with the background at relatively short distances. The Navy therefore ordered a number of government vessels painted accordingly.

More About William Andrew Mackay

Ship camouflage proposals by William Andrew Mackay

Since starting this blog, we have featured a number of posts either about William Andrew Mackay, an American muralist and World War I ship camouflage artist, or about various artists who worked with him as wartime camoufleurs in New York (see links below to previous posts). More recently, we've discovered full-color reproductions of at least two of his ship camouflage designs (shown above) in Lindell T. Bates, The Science of Low Visibility and Deception (New York: Submarine Defense Association, 1918).

These are cut-out ship silhouettes that were used for testing two different but related proposals by Mackay. Both of these are attempts to achieve low visibility by using small splotches of color (not unlike a Pointilist painting) which, at a great distance, would be seen as a nondescript ambient gray, less discernible than a simple, one-color "battleship gray." In the model at the top, Mackay has combined these low visibility splotches with large, disruptive patterns that (at somewhat closer distances) were intended to make it harder to see the ship as a single, continuous shape.

Mackay's drawing for US Patent No. 1,305,296 (1919)

In 1919, Mackay obtained a patent for a similar proposal. His patent drawing (above) and a full text account are online here.

There are surviving photographs of camouflaged ships using Mackay's methods. Shown below for example are WWI-era photographs of (top to bottom) of USS DeKalb, and USS Isabel (full view, followed by a deck detail).

USS DeKalb

USS Isabel (port side)

USS Isabel (close-up of camouflage pattern)

Other posts on this blog that pertain to William Andrew Mackay. For additional info, see brief biographical article in Camoupedia, and (especially) "Camouflage Science Explained" by Raymond Francis Yates (1919) in Ship Shape.

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Was Credit Camouflaged? | Roosevelt Murals

William Andrew Mackay booklet on Roosevelt murals (1944)

Here's yet another post about American muralist William Andrew Mackay, who was an early contributor (some say the earliest) to World War I ship camouflage. In previous posts, his name has come up frequently, because of his own achievements but also because of the work that was done by other artists who had attended his NYC camouflage school. Aside from camouflage, at one time he was a widely known muralist, having created prominent works for the Library of Congress, 1939 World's Fair, Minnesota House of Representatives, and others.

As a muralist, perhaps his most famous achievement is a set of massive murals in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Completed in 1935, the famous murals are 34 feet high and 62 feet wide, covering an area of 5,230 square feet. Mackay died on the street of a heart attack in 1939. In 1944, the museum published a posthumous booklet, written by Mackay and A.A. Canfield of the New York State Department of Public Works, titled The Murals in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall (NYC: American Museum of Natural History, in which it is twice stated that the murals “were painted by William Andrew Mackay."

More recently, in a process requiring two years to complete, the Roosevelt Rotunda murals were restored and reopened to the public on Roosevelt's birthday, October 27, 2012. In various news reports, the public was reminded that the man who made them was Mackay, described as "a pioneer in the development of ship camouflage in World War I." 

That said, we found it of interest to happen upon a long-forgotten news article titled “’T.R.’ Memorial Murals Painted by Pittsburgher,” published in The Pittsburgh Press, on October 30, 1936—

A former left handed trumpet player from Pittsburgh was the artist who actually painted the murals in the [Roosevelt Rotunda at the] New York State Theodore Roosevelt Memorial…

The man who created the murals, it was discovered today, was Cliff Young, who earned his way through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh by playing a trumpet. He is left handed.

It was not known that Mr. Young had done the work, as the booklets which carry a description of the memorial building have referred only to William Andrew Mackay, winner of the competition held between 25 nationally known artists who submitted sketches.

Responsible for the discovery of the part played by the left-handed trumpeter was Willis Shook, [founder and] director of the art school who stumbled upon his former pupil on a recent trip to New York.

Mr. Mackay directed the execution, employing Mr. Young to do the work, according to Mr. Shook.…

Mr. Young twice painted in his own portrait in the murals, although he hung a beard on his face in order to carry out the scheme of the original designs [as in his self-portrait as Vladimir near the bottom of the mural on Russian history].…

Cliff Young, Figure Drawing Without a Model (1945), p. 42.

With additional sleuthing, we found out that Cliff Young (1905-1985) was a painter and cartoonist who worked for DC Comics during World War II as an illustrator of Green Arrow [Wikipedia article includes one of Cliff Young's covers].

He also wrote two books about learning to draw, Figure Drawing Without a Model (NY: House of Little Books, 1946), and Drawing Drapery from Head to Toe (same publisher, 1947, later reprinted by Dover, 2007).

Originally from Pittsburgh, he studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Grand Central School of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, National Academy of Design, Carnegie Institute, and Art Students League of New York.

Camouflage Artist | Daniel Putnam Brinley

Daniel Putnam Brinley (1879-1963)

Above Daniel Putnam Brinley, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum (J0001309).

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In earlier posts, we've talked about American muralist William Andrew Mackay, who was a major contributor to World War I ship camouflage. Over the years, we've been able to expand the list of those who worked with him as camouflage artists when he oversaw the painting of merchant ships in the New York area for the US Shipping Board. We've also found the names of those who studied with him at a camouflage school he established during the war, among them Harold Everitt Austin, Charles Bittinger, Henry Scott Bluhm, Thomas Casilear Cole, Maurice Lisso Freedman, Eric Gugler, W.S. Gephart, George Edgerly Harris, Kenneth S. Maclntire, Raymond J. Richardson, Frank Julius Spicker, Walter L. Ward, and Charles D. Bosisio. There were others as well.

A name that should be added is that of another muralist, Daniel Putnam Brinley (1879-1963), who not only worked on ship camouflage with Mackay, but may also have served in the US Army as a camoufleur. The primary documentation for this is in the Daniel Putnam Brinley and Katherine Sanger Brinley papers in the Archives of American Art. In that collection, there is a Brinley typescript that seems to be a chronology of his "camouflage work for navy" in Baltimore in October 1917. He mentions Mackay (referred to as "Mac") and Commander J.O. Fisher, who worked with Mackay on early experiments in ship camouflage. There is another interesting entry (dated October 21) in which he notes that, while visiting Fisher in Washington DC, he also "went over to the Camp [American University] to see what was going on with the [US Army] Camouflage Corps." In the following passage, he mentions three of the original members of that unit, William Twigg-Smith, William Nell and Barry Faulkner (a cousin of Abbott H. Thayer):

They [the Camouflage Corps] are still in rather a hectic state as far as I can see, and the chief interest at present is a vaudeville show [a fund-raising effort] they are getting up. I asked for Twigg but he was not around. I saw Billy Nell and he seemed to be enjoying himself although he said he had had a bad cold…They all wanted to know what had happened to me and when I told them they said they could not understand it especially Barry Faulkner as he said that the surgeon put him down as blind without his glasses! and some of the men said that they never had their eyes looked at, rather amusing is it not.

In a later entry, Brinley mentions another Army camoufleur, an illustrator named F. Earl Christy. Another document in the AAA collection is a letter written by Mackay on September 7 of that same year. Apparently Brinley (who had served in the Army in 1916, prior to the US participation in WWI) was hoping to be able to join the Army Camouflage Corps, and Mackay's letter is a verification of his experience and capabilities. It reads in part:

This is to certify that the bearer, Daniel Putnam Brinley has worked under my directions and is thoroughly familiar with the laws of light and form as applied to the term "Camouflage."

His knowledge of color for concealment is of greatest value and his ability to assist me on important experiments carried on for the United States Navy is of greatest importance.

One other odd connection: Of Brinley's artistic achievements, one of the best-known is a series of maps he created for the Liberty Memorial (the National World War I Museum) in Kansas City MO, which are on exhibit in Memory Hall. As noted in an earlier post, that same museum also has the surviving portion of a huge diorama, the Panthéon de la Guerre, completed in 1918 by French artists who were serving as army camoufleurs.

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[Added June 23, 2014]: Brinley was also a member of the American Association of Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), which organized the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Shortly after its opening, they held an uproarious dinner at Healy's Restaurant in honor of "our Friends and Enemies of the Press." Elizabeth Lunday, in The Modern Art Invasion (Guilford CT: Lyons Press, 2013, p. 75), describes what happened as the evening wore on—

Perhaps inspired by the dancing waitresses, artist D. Putnam Brinley, who stood nearly seven feet tall, began a high-kicking contest, which he unsurprisingly won. Then the short, bearded sculptor Jo Davidson joined him on the floor, and he and Brinley danced a tango. A heavy knock was heard at the door and in walked a doddering old man in a long white beard and an old-fashioned stovepipe hat. He introduced himself as The National Academy of Design, then joined Davidson and Brinley in a riotous Turkey Trot.

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 [Added January 15, 2016] Abel G. Warshawsky, The Memories of an American Impressionist. Ben L. Bassham, ed. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1980, p. 19—

My most difficult opponent in hand-wrestling was Putnam Brindly [sic], a young giant, six feet three in his socks, whom I met many years later decorating army huts on the French front when my brother and I were similarly engaged. He was then so tall that he could do stencils on the ceiling without using a ladder.

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Camouflage Artist | William Andrew Mackay

 

William Andrew Mackay (1876-1939) was a well-known American muralist, who also played a prominent role in World War I ship camouflage. Shown here are three photographs of him, one of which (top left) was probably made near the end of his life, by Peter A. Juley and Son. He is considerably younger in the other two photographs, which are wartime publicity photographs made by the US Government (probably the US Navy) and subsequently reproduced in popular magazines. 

At the time, Mackay was working for the US Shipping Board (Emergency Fleet Corporation), for which he was in charge of painting camouflage on merchant ships in the New York district. Earlier in the war, Mackay had proposed a camouflage scheme, which became one of only five such schemes to be approved for use. Later in the war, all US ship camouflage (military and civilian) was overseen by the US Navy's camouflage section (headed by Harold Van Buskirk). 

Officially, Mackay and his artists were not permitted to design camouflage, only to adapt designs that were provided to them by the design subsection of the camouflage unit (headed by Everett L. Warner). Evidently, Mackay resented this lack of acknowledgment of his expertise and all but ignored the restrictions. Later, he founded a camouflage school (c1920) and published a Handbook on Ship Camouflage (1937). In the top right photo, he is applying a camouflage scheme to a wooden ship model, and in the lower photo he is studying a camouflaged model through a portable viewing device that simulates the  point of view of a submarine periscope.

Toy Boat Camouflage

The photo above was published in the New York Tribune (May 11, 1919), p. 8, with the following caption: 

A corner of the model room of the camouflage section of the [US] Navy Department. Scale models of every type of vessel, decorated with the weirdest of designs, are kept here for test and experimental purposes. It is easy to imagine what undoubted joy would be Young America's were he once let loose in this toy shipyard. 

The person on the right is Harold Van Buskirk, the executive officer in charge of the Camouflage Section (which had two branches), while on the left is Everett L. Warner, who headed the Design Subsection in Washington DC. It was the Navy's responsibility to provide the camouflage designs for all American ships, both military and merchant, the plans for which were then sent out to teams of artists assigned to dock officers (called District Camoufleurs) at coastal harbors throughout the country. The District Camoufleur for Brooklyn NY was muralist William Andrew Mackay. Only recently, we discovered the following article from 1919, in which he is interviewed at length about his work as a camoufleur. [The photos on this blog post were not part of the original article.]

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Two months earlier, the following article, written by Otis Peabody Swift, was published in the New York Evening World Daily Magazine (March 6, 1919) with the headline HOW A NEW YORK ARTIST, WITH TOY BOATS, WORKED OUT CAMOUFLAGE TO FOIL U-BOATS: In William Andrew Mackay's studio, sixty men under his direction worked night and day on designs of the United States Shipping Board, using diminutive models [like those shown here].

Now that the war is over many "mystery stories" of the war can at last be told. Perhaps one of the most interesting is the story of camouflage, the weird painting of seagoing ships that baffled and defeated the sea wolves of the submarines.

Camouflage, as developed in this war, is a product of American study and imagination. It is largely the result of the work of William Andrew Mackay, the New York artist and interior decorator, who for five years before the war experimented with the idea of protective coloration for American battleships. And the success of his plan is shown by the fact that of the 749 American vessels camouflaged according to the designs of the United States Shipping Board, supplied by the navy, only seven were sunk.

It was in the big studio workshop of the Mackay School of Camouflage at 345 East 33rd Street [in Manhattan] that the camouflage idea was developed. Here sixty men worked day and night disguising the American ships.

Along the walls of the big studio hang marine background paintings, showing the various color tints of the oceans. There are the long gray green wave of the North Atlantic, and the violet fog of the [English] Channel. There is the deep warm blue of the Gulf Stream, and the muddy brown of the Gironde delta. Against these backgrounds the camouflage effects were tested. Over in a corner stands a real periscope, manned by Skipper Mackay. And on tables, chairs, racks and shelves are dozens of nine- and ten-inch wooden models of merchant ships, awaiting their coat of camouflage.

When a vessel was to be camouflaged a wooden model was first made up of the ship, exact in every detail. Then different types of camouflage were applied and tested through the periscope against the different marine backgrounds. It was the old sport of playing boats. Famous artists and architects, students in the school, sailed their toys across the maneuvering boards. There were over a hundred of these little ships, and they formed a navy that would delight a youngster's heart. Then when a satisfactory design, one well fitted to that particular vessel, had been decided upon the plans were sent to the shipyard or dry-dock, where the actual camouflage would be applied.

"Yes, this looks like a deserted battlefield to me," said Mr. Mackay at the studio yesterday. "It was here that the first work of camouflage was developed. In all, 749 vessels were camouflaged, and sixty men, artists, architects and designers, made this shop their headquarters, under direction of the United States Shipping Board, working over designs, testing colors, peering through the periscope at the wooden models, and then dashing off to try out some few effect on the vessels that, in a few days, would be depending upon our skill in the art of disguise to save them from the U-boats.

But let's go back to the beginning. Caesar invented camouflage. His tiriemes that sailed north to conquer the red-haired Britons were all painted green, and his crews were ordered to wear green suits to make them less visible. In Macbeth we find the soldiers carrying trees to conceal themselves on that day when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane. But modern camouflage, as developed by the war, is the product of American study.

Seven years ago, when I was at Newport, I read a volume by Prof. Ogden N. Rood of Columbia University entitled Modern Chromatics. He pointed out that the gray of nature—the sky, rocks and trees—is a combination of red, green and violet. It then occurred to me that by blending these colors I might evolve a battleship gray that would make our dreadnoughts less visible. Commander J.O. Fisher, USN, had been working along similar lines at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Together we experimented in 1915 on American submarines at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We painted them in stripes and bars, and there evolved the first principles on which modern camouflage is based.

When the United States entered the war I placed the results of these experiments before the Navy Department. I privately undertook to camouflage American merchant vessels, and also opened the Mackay School, where fifteen camoufleurs were trained for the navy. Then I was appointed District Camoufleur by the Shipping Hoard, and the big job began. Plans were supplied by the Shipping Board, and new types of camouflage were worked out at their Washington headquarters.

There was nothing haphazard about the art. Every ragged line, every crazy angle, jarring color, had a meaning. First you must understand that there are really two kinds of camouflage. There is the camouflage which attempts to make a boat less visible, and thereby permits it to escape the enemy, and that camouflage which, although the boat shows up plainly, deceives the enemy as to the course, speed and identity of the craft. The most successful method was a combination of both forms.

In England Commander Wilkinson RN had been working on the idea and had developed the dazzle system. This consisted of large black and white figures. It dazzled the sub. He could see the boat, but he couldn’t place his shot. There were just as many subs, and they saw just as many British boats, but they couldn't hit them. Before the camouflage was put on the Germans got fifty boats a week. Afterward the average was ten boats a week.

Here in the States we combined the dazzle idea with low visibility. There were many tricks to the trade. You see the subs would shoot up their periscope and got a look at the ship. They based their mathematical calculations on what they saw in that moment's glance. We painted a false bow wave along the side of the ship, which, by foreshortening, made the vessel seem farther away than it was. We broke down all vertical lines, destroying the ship's silhouette by which they ascertained identity. We painted on the false bow lines which her appear to be going in another direction.

Above The top photo is a plaster unpainted model of the SS Baxley. According to other sources, ship models for this purpose were usually made of wood. The bottom photo is the actual ship after its camouflage scheme was applied.

From time to time other more spectacular methods of camouflage were adopted. The Von Steuben came into port one day with a destroyer painted on her side. Other vessels painted SC [submarine chaser] boats on their sides, some painted superimposed bows on their sterns so you couldn't tell which end was which. Of course the cubist artist hailed camouflage as the logical development of beauty and art, and said that from now on all ships and houses and automobiles ought to be decorated that way. But camouflage was purely utilitarian—we forgot the artistic part. We didn't care how the ship looked if it could dodge the submarines.

And they certainly did. It was so successful that we took to camouflaging SC boats, seaplanes and even houses and barracks on land where there was danger of air raids—as at Porto Corsino, Italy, and Dunkirk. The Germans got the idea and camouflaged their submarines, and camouflage got into vaudeville and the dictionary. Well, it's all over now. The ships are coming up the bay in their peacetime paint, and all the checkerboard ships and the Welsh rarebit decorations are a thing of the past. The big point is that it did the work. Of the 749 boats that were camouflaged in the second district only seven were sunk.”

Today Mr. Mackay is packing up the toy ships of the 33rd Street studio and is sending them to the Brooklyn Museum, where with the periscope and the deep sea background, they will afford the public an idea of how a wartime convoy looked at sea. And he is going to his bungalow at Coytesville, NJ, just atop the Palisades [Park], and forget all about ships while tramping round the woods with Patricia Mackay, aged seven, who has a toy boat collection that is the envy of every youngster in Jersey.

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Camouflage Artist | Carol Sax from Ottumwa IA

Above The top image is a colored lithographic print of a World War I dazzle camouflaged merchant ship. These plans were printed in multiples and distributed to various harbors around the country, They were used, as described below, as on-site reference diagrams as the ships were being painted. This particular copy (in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum) is oddly signed by Baltimore artist Griffith Bailey Coale, suggesting that he designed it. He may or may not have, probably not. As a camouflage artist, he was not attached to the US Navy's Camouflage Design Subsection in Washington DC, where the plans were originated. Instead, he and Carol Sax were part of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, whose artists were responsible for applying designs that had been developed by the artists at the subsection. Several incomplete sets have survived, most notably at the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design. In each complete set, there are more than 450 dfferent designs.

Below that is a wooden model of the same ship, covered with more or less the same design. These ship models (about one foot in length) were prepared first, then tested for effectiveness in a special periscope-equipped viewing theatre. Based on those test results, the scheme was either abandoned, or modified and then passed on to the drafting room, where the colored diagram was prepared.

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Carol Mayer Sax (1885-1961) was an American artist, theatrical designer and teacher who served as a ship camouflage designer during World War I. Born and raised in Ottumwa IA, he spent much of his professional life as a teacher and theatre designer in Baltimore MD, Lexington KY, and New York. His father, Jacob B. Sax (1853-1922) had immigrated to the US from Germany, where he became the proprietor of a major clothing store in Iowa, the J.B. Sax Company in Ottumwa. 

Sax's mother Estella (or Stella) Mayer Sax (1864-1928) (born Rosenfield) grew up in Rock Island IL. Described in retrospect as a “wealthy socialite,” she was a prominent member of the Ottumwa Women’s Club, and in 1903 was the city's delegate to a meeting of the Iowa Federation of Women’s Clubs in Des Moines. She “was involved in other civic and charitable activities and was known for her collection of art, and [her] love of travel.” In a article in the Ottumwa Courier (December 15, 1945, p. 11), it was announced that the family mansion had been given to the Trinity Episcopal Church, which is in the same Fifth Street Bluff Historic District. Following the death of the parents, the huge home was maintained for several years by Carol Sax and his sister “as a virtual museum and memorial to their parents who had filled the home with art treasures, collections of antiques and rare furnishings. The garden, too, had been maintained as one of the city’s showplaces."

After completing high school, Carol Sax studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, the National Academy of Design, and Columbia University. In the fall of 1912, he returned to Iowa to deliver a talk at the Southern Iowa Normal School (a school for teacher training in nearby Bloomfield) on the value of drawing, and to urge that subject to be taught in public schools “more fully or dropped entirely.” The text of his talk was reprinted in the Ottumwa Courier (August 27, 1912, p. 4).

Denis Broughton (1900) Photograph of Ruth St. Denis

In 1916, while working independently as a designer in Baltimore, Sax was one of three founders of the Vagabond Players, one of the country’s oldest, continuous acting arenas, associated with the Little Theatre Movement. It was Sax who designed the Vagabond Theatre interior, on West Center Street near Monument Square in Baltimore. Meanwhile, while working professionally, he was praised for the sets and costumes he designed for Ruth St. Denis, an early proponent of Modern Dance, co-founder of the American Denishawn School of Dance, and a teacher of Martha Graham.

In the fall of 1915, while still living in Baltimore, Sax started an informal workshop in applied (or commercial) art, in which his students (functioning as informal interns) designed and constructed theatre components for actual stage productions. The success of that workshop apparently led to an offer to teach at the Maryland Institute of Art. In the words of a Baltimore news article (quoted in an issue of the Ottumwa Daily Review, April 10, 1916, p. 3)—

There was a feeling among the pupils [in Baltimore] that in graduating they suffered a disadvantage in trying to take commercial positions without having any distinctly commercial training. Understanding this difficulty on the part of the pupils and feeling that there existed a [rationale] for it, Mr. Sax started his commercial art class, at first quite separate from the Maryland Institute. A studio was rented [in] November a year ago [1915] and Mr. Sax, to give the class a start, turned over to it his personal commissions, which, he declared, was no sacrifice, as he didn’t have time to do them himself anyway.

From November to April of the first season the pupils handled commissions amounting in all to $2,000, a pretty good starter.

This year [1916] the class, having got a start, [was taken over by] the Maryland Institute. The former studio was [abandoned and the class is now taught] in a big room on the first floor of the Institute Building.

***

Later that year, the Ottumwa Courier noted (September 12, 1916, p. 7) that "The Maryland Institute is the largest art school in the country, having an enrollment of 1,400 pupils, and Mr. Sax has 300 in his classes.”

••• 

Baltimore’s Vagabond Theatre opened in November 1916 with an inaugural program that included three one-act plays, one of which (an esoteric experiment called The Artist) was written by celebrated Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken. In the months before the opening, as Carol Sax was painting the interior of the Vagabond Theatre, a local artist who worked with him was a muralist named Griffith Bailey Coale (1890-1950), who had studied at the Maryland Institute of Art, and at European museums and art schools. Coale’s participation is curious because (like Sax) he too would later work as a camouflage artist in the closing years of WWI. Both men were contracted by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which oversaw the application of dazzle camouflage schemes to American merchant ships. Among other camouflage artists who worked as camoufleurs in the Baltimore shipyards were James H. Daugherty, W.S. Gephart, Ralph Boyer, Henry G. Pierce and Jesse Mason. 

Another of the founders of the Vagabond Players was Constance d’Arcy Mackay (1887-1966), whose family was from St Paul MN, and who popularized the Little Theatre Movement by her influential book in 1917. It is entirely speculation that she may have been related to a prominent New York interior designer named William Andrew Mackay (1876-1939), who had created murals in 1904 for the Minnesota House of Representatives Statehouse in St Paul. Later, during WWI, Mackay established a camouflage school in his New York studio, and was hired by the Emergency Fleet Corporation to oversee merchant ship camouflage at the New York-area shipyard. A substantial number of the artists who contributed to WWI ship camouflage (including Coale and some of those listed above) were apparently trained by Mackay, of whom Sax was probably one. As for another possible link between theatre innovator Constance d’Arcy Mackay and camoufleur William Andrew Mackay, it may be significant that the latter’s father, Frank Findley Mackay (1832-1923), was a well-known stage actor, acting teacher, theatre enthusiast, and owner of the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Another possible link may be through Charles Donald Mackay (1867-1935), brother of William Andrew Mackay, who was a stage and silent film actor. 

While not directly relevant to camouflage, it is fascinating nevertheless that, as Carol Sax was preparing the Vagabond Theatre for its opening, another person who worked with him was a physics professor named Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955). Wood was an accomplished American physicist, and a pioneering contributor to the study of ultra-violet light and infra-red, He was living in Baltimore because he had been teaching at Johns Hopkins University since 1903. Wood served in the US Army during WWI, and even if not directly involved in camouflage, he was greatly interested in theatrical lighting, stage magic, and the widest range of illusions. In addition, Wood was notoriously inclined toward practical jokes (not always harmless) and amusing but simple humorous rhymes. Among non-scientists today, he is most often remembered as the author and illustrator of a children’s book about spurious resemblances, titled How To Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Wood-Cuts: A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners, in which he used mock-mimicry (in drawings and verse) to confuse a Pansy with a Chimpansy, an Antelope with a Cantaloupe, and a Parrot with a Carrot.

When WWI ended in November 1918, Carol Sax had been working as a camouflage artist for only a few months. Soon after, when he returned to Iowa to visit, an article was published in the Des Moines Register about his experience as a camoufleur. The following is the complete text from that—

IOWAN AIDED US AS CAMOUFLEUR in Des Moines Register. February 2, 1919, p. 30—

OTTUMWA, IA, Feb. 1—C.M. Sax, an Ottumwa boy who was one of the 246 artists of the country salaried by the Emergency Fleet Corporation as an official camoufleur has laid down his brush for a time with the coming of peace and has been visiting at his home here. Mr. Sax is art instructor in the Maryland Institute at Baltimore and chair of the art division, Baltimore Admen’s Club.

His particular duty was camouflaging Uncle Sam’s transports and cargo carriers so that these ocean liners could evade the German sub. Recent figures given out show that camouflage of ships played one of the biggest parts in the defeat of submarines. So effective was the “dazzle” system of camouflage used by the Americans that of the 1,240 ships painted in this manner only nine were sunk by subs. The percentage of sinkings among uncamouflaged vessels is said to have been nearly four times as great.

“At the outset,” says Mr. Sax, “painters were secured and foremen employed to mark off lines from the designs furnished in a purely mechanical way. This was effective only when the designs had been drawn to the scale of a given ship. However, when designs had to be adapted to other ships of differing types and sizes, as was invariably the case, it was necessary to have the supervision of a camoufleur throughly conversant with the principles of camouflage. 

"In some instances the vessels were not camouflaged, but merely repainted in weird color schemes. Without the scientifically artistic eye, the very angle that should have been covered might have been left undone, and shadow effects placed where there should have been light.

"It was found that no design could be used without some adaptation on two different types of ships, even though they be of about the same size. Hence it was necessary to have camoufleurs on the job at all times to determine these adaptations. Sailors often would assist the artists with a zeal not displayed by less interested employees.

"Camoufleurs also had their troubles, especially when the work was first taken up. When the scheme finally was accepted, however, orders came in rushes. Consequently it was up to the camoufleurs to get them out in a hurry. Often times a ship would come into port, and while it was being loaded or unloaded as the case might be, artists had to veil it with a coat of disguising designs. Ordinarily it took from one to six days to ‘do’ a ship.

"In the beginning camoufleurs experienced some difficulty in convincing proud ship captains that at times neatly kept brass fittings must be marred by great streaks of paint. To leave any parts undone meant the annulling of the whole camouflage scheme. It was the purpose to break up straight lines or any distinguishing angles about the ship’s structure so that from the periscope it would be unable to determine the course of the ship. Many of the designs caused the ship to have two bows or sterns.

"When naval officers were skeptical about the effect of camouflage they would be taken to the camouflage theater [in William Andrew Mackay’s studio] in New York City, where from improvised periscopes they would attempt to observe the course of models which had been camouflaged. Their inability to determine the course quickly convinced them.”

***

At the end of WWI, Carol Sax returned to his position at the Maryland Institute of Art. A few years later he moved to the University of Kentucky at Lexington, where he served as the Head of the Art Department from 1921 to 1929. Around 1924, he once again founded a “little theatre,” called the Romany Theatre (the name alludes to vagabonds and gypsies) in Lexington. This became possible when an African-American Baptist church relocated, and its small ramshackle building (on the edge of the university campus) became vacant. The purpose of the Romany Theatre was “the presentation of plays on the basis of art with the element of commercial profit left out, and its players are both local and imported” (as reported in The Key, Vol XLII No 1, February 1925, pp. 25-26). In 1928, a new director was appointed, and it was renamed the Guignol Theatre.

Initially, the outside of the newly founded Romany Theatre was “a dreary sight…sickly, greenish gray in hue, a drab, ugly shack.” As a promotional gimmick, Sax and his students came up with a plan of “inviting the student body and townspeople to a painting party, the purpose of which was to be the brightening of the Romany’s exterior.” Earlier, in WWI news reports, dazzle-camouflaged ships (such as those that Sax and Coale had worked on) had been lampooned as cubist nightmares, sea-going easter eggs, a Russian toyshop gone made—and even the delirium tremens. At the end of the Romany Theatre’s painting party, the building’s exterior was “adorned wth gaily colored splotches of paint, campus caricatures, and football scores…” It reminded some people of a dazzle-camouflaged ship, and indeed it was described in a magazine as “a nightmare, a riot of color, resembling nothing so much as the palette of an artist with delirium tremens."

In contrast to the outside, the building’s interior (of which a photograph survives) was anything but chaotic. Presumably designed by Sax, it was “a soothing symphony of exquisite blended color harmonies. The wall of the toy foyer are decorated with beautifully patterned Russian designs, and the entire interior carries out the gypsy motif in tambourine lights, mural decorations and curtains." 

Romany Theatre painting party

Romany Theatre interior and stage

In 1922, while Carol Sax was still at the University of Kentucky, his father died. His father Jacob B. Sax, a wealthy Ottumwa clothing store merchant, was praised in the press at the time of his death as a “bank trustee and official, promoter of civic enterprises and one of the leaders in charitable and philanthropic efforts…[a person who] was active in every form of civic interest.”  Six years later, when Carol Sax’s mother died, she too was remembered as having been remarkably generous in her contributions to the community. It was recalled that she was active in the group that organized the public library, years in advance of the opening of the city’s Carnegie Library in 1902. The civic activities of Carol Sax’s parents appear to have encouraged his own. Throughout his professional life, he was frequently featured in Ottumwa newspaper articles, describing the occasional visits he made, during which he encouraged local artists, sponsored art exhibitions, and gave talks on the virtues of studying art. 

One of his last visits took place in 1941, when he was slated to discuss “Art and the Theatre” to a public audience at the city’s community art center. As reported in an article in the Ottumwa Courier (October 16, 1941, p. 7), the walls of the gallery in which Sax’s talk was held were lined with works of abstract art. Sax began by talking about his career in the theatre, but at some point an audience member asked, “What is that conglomeration behind you?” His talk then became a discussion of how to understand abstract art, portions of which were reprinted in the news story: “Abstract art has value,” said Sax, “if it contributes something in the way of aesthetic appreciation. Too many people look at abstract art and try to find representation there. It isn’t present. It isn’t supposed to be. Abstract art is a treatment of form, color, line, space."

***

In 1929, Sax left the University of Kentucky, and relocated to New York. He then joined another experimental theatre, in this case an American stock company, located in Paris on the Champs Élysées. But the governmental red tape was frustrating and the productions were not of sufficient appeal to French audiences, in part because they only used American actors, performing in mostly American plays. He remained for only a season, then returned to New York, where he once again worked as a theatre designer. 

Another opportunity to live outside of the US came in the fall of 1934, when he was named the managing producer of the Manchester Repertory Theatre in Manchester, England. But that too was short-lived, and he soon returned to New York, where he resumed his professional work in theatre design and production.

Carol Sax died in New York on September 28, 1961, at age 76.

***
I am grateful to the staff at the Ottumwa Public Library, where I was able to find information about Carol M. Sax in their genealogy research files.—RB