Camouflage Artist | Ezra Winter

The Ezra Winter Project (online)

American artist Ezra Winter (1886-1949) was born near Traverse City MI. He attended Olivet College (in Michigan), then studied in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute, where he graduated in 1911. In the same year, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome, by which he was able to study for three years at the American Academy in Rome. Winter's prize was in the category of painting, for what was described in a news story at the time as "a large canvas called The Arts, a beautiful and graceful work." A young Denver architect, George Simpson Keyl , received the same prize in that category, while the Prix de Rome in sculpture that year was awarded to Harry Dickinson Thrasher.

Thrasher had grown up in Plainfield NH, where he had been a student of the most famous American sculptor at the turn of the century, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As Thrasher was growing up, among his friends were Saint-Gaudens' son, named Homer (a theatre designer and, later, an arts administrator), and a young painter from Dublin NH named Barry Faulkner (he was a cousin and student of Abbott Handerson Thayer, the so-called "father of camouflage," and had studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens as well). Later, Faulkner became a prominent muralist, and a friend of Ezra Winter, with whom he collaborated on several major projects.

When the US entered World War I, a unit for camouflage artists was formed by the US Army. One of the officers in charge of that unit was Homer Saint-Gaudens, while among the very first artists to join were Barry Faulkner and Harry Dickinson Thrasher. After a period of training on the grounds of the American University near Washington DC, their unit was deployed to France at the end of 1917. Of the camoufleurs, there were only two who didn't return—Everett A. Herter (the brother of US diplomat Christian Herter) and Harry Thrasher, both of whom were killed in France in 1918. Faulkner delivered the eulogy at Thrasher's funeral.

At the same time, Ezra Winter was in New York, where, as a civilian, he worked for the US Shipping Board, as a member of one of thirteen teams of camouflage artists (stationed at various ports around the country) who supervised the painting of dazzle camouflage schemes on thousands of commercial ships (called merchant ships). In charge of the unit that Winter was in was another prominent muralist, William Andrew Mackay. According to official policy, the artists assigned to ship painting were not responsible for the design of the camouflage plans, only for applying them.

Instead, the initial camouflage plans were designed by another team of artists at the Navy's Camouflage Section in Washington DC (there was another research group, largely made up of scientists, at the Eastman Kodak Laboratories in Rochester NY). The DC team of artists made wooden scale models of merchant ships, applied experimental patterns to them, and tested their effectiveness in an observation theatre. The patterns that worked the best were then drawn up, printed in multiples as color lithographs, and sent out to the various harbors, where they served as a "blueprint" while painting the ships.

One of the artists in the Navy's DC camouflage team (the group that actually designed the camouflage patterns) was a British-born American sculptor named John Gregory. There are photographs of him, seated in a room with other camouflage artists (Everett L. Warner, Frederick Waugh, Gordon Stevenson, and others), painting camouflage patterns on miniature ships.

Ezra Winter is not in these photos of course, because he was attached to Mackay's unit in New York. But he is in other photographs (taken shortly after the war) when, as he worked on commissions (one of which was the interior of the Cunard Building in New York), he was photographed with two of his collaborators—his fellow wartime camoufleurs Barry Faulkner and John Gregory.

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For more on Ezra Winter, see The Ezra Winter Project by Jessica Helfand, who is co-founder of a Connecticut-based design studio called Winterhouse—located in Ezra Winter's former home and studio in Falls Village CT. As of this posting, three Winter-related installments have been issued, the most recent two at here and here.

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 / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

how to be a futurist —and the birth of modernist snow

Above A British satirical cartoon about Futurism, published in 1912, one year in advance of the American Armory Show (first US exhibit of Modern Art), and two years before the formation (by the French Army) of a wartime camouflage section. Disruptive camouflage would thereafter be commonly said to have come from Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism.

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Anon, THE SNOWSCAPE: Revelation of Modern Art Not Futurism, Cubism or Other Cosmic Urge, but Phase of Nature, reprinted from the New York Herald in St. Joseph News-Press on January 8, 1923—

The great revelation of modern art is not futurism, cubism, vorticism, or any other of the Freudian cosmic urges. Movements of that sort most always belong strictly to the self-elected heirs of an impredicable posterity.

The revelation of modern art is snow. From the brilliant palette of today a new mantle of pleasure has fallen upon the consciousness of cultivated perception lighter and more lovely than the past ever dreamed.

Snow to the Greeks and Romans was merely something cool to put in a beverage. Among the Italian primitives and through the Renaissance snow scarcely existed save on some background mountain top. Here and there a later Dutchman accepted it as a necessary adjunct to a winter genre. But for the most part art excluded it through a convention almost as rigid as that by which the Japanese printmakers ignored shadows.

The Japanese, of course, loved snow and filled their designs with It. But it was never more than spacing or applied white lead. And the snow blindness of Western art persisted far into the last century. Imagine a snow scene by Corot. Some men, perhaps, were attempting it, especially religious painters, who required it to chill their lost sheep, but only in the Christmas card kind of way until Sisley discovered that Paris streets became in winter an opalescent wonder.

And that is precisely the vital modern discovery—that snow is not white. Faint rose, azure, orchid, lavender, primrose, pearl, or any possible combination in the higher keys it may be, but blank white, never! The sky Itself is not more varied or richer in hue or texture. No one who has ever studied a Redfield, for example. or one of the Swedish, can continue to think of the winter landscape as a dull white sheet of other than a prismatic Persian carpet replete with glorious astonishments.

Modern art has excelled in this alone. Snow is probably the only phase of nature that is being painted better and more sympathetically today than ever before. And because the artist is an interpreter who walks only a few feet ahead of his generation thousands upon thousands of us will look from our windows this winter upon a shimmering rainbow tinted world our fathers never knew.

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

WWI Camouflage in Des Moines

WWI truck camouflage

Above World War I camouflaged truck in France (c1918).

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From an unsigned news article titled CAMOUFLAGE ARTIST SUGGESTS HOW TO HELP AUTOISTS GET AROUND COP'S FEET in the Des Moines News, Des Moines IA (1917)—

Pierre Defregger, artist, issued from his East-side attic last week for the first time in nigh onto 20 years.

For years Pierre has been so busy in his attic painting pictures of cast iron oak trees growing beside wooden rivers that run uphill, that the census man has never discovered him.

But Pierre should worry.

When he came out of his attic, he brought with him a regular twentieth century idea, hatched by him in solitude, which he says will save the city of Des Moines thousands of dollars in the long run, and prove a pleasure and convenience to local taxpayers.

All Pierre asks in return is that he be put on the city's payroll at a fair salary, with the title of Professional Camouflage Artist.

Here are some of the time-saving, money-saving innovations that Pierre Defregger thinks that a first-class camouflage artist could accomplish for Des Moines:

1. Camouflage the feet of all traffic officers to look like the pavement, so that motorists can drive right over them and not have to go way around. "This would take considerable paint," Defregger points out, "but the cost is inconsiderable when compared with the saving of time to motorists."

2. Camouflage the legs of all women who wear unreasonably short skirts this winter. This might be done in a number of ways. Either camouflage them the color of the atmosphere so that they are invisible, thus saving the boys great eye strain, or camouflage them to represent hitching posts. "When it is taken into consideration," says Pierre at this point, "that most women wait from an hour to two hours for a car, it readily may be seen that a number of teamsters could tie their horses to the camouflaged posts during that period."

3. Camouflage the soft coal smoke issuing from Des Moines' winter chimneys, to represent sunset cloud effects. This could be accomplished by painting the soot particles by means of a squirt gun filled with paint of the desired shade. Says Pierre: "Fly specks on restaurant ceilings could be camouflaged into picturesque effects at small cost, obviating the necessity of redecorating each spring."

4. Camouflage a river to stick under the $400,000 worth of new bridges being built by the city.

5. Show Emil Schmidt* how to camouflage stoves in his street cars this winter.

6. Show Ralph Bolton** how to camouflage heat and light for the Coliseum.

Pierre Defregger, artist that he is, says if the city hires him, he will not guarantee successfully to camouflage food, brains nor clothing. The first two are honestly impossible, says Pierre, and camouflaged clothes always would meet opposition, he thinks, from the prudes.

When asked what he considered the best example of camouflage, Pierre replied: "Bread pudding."

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* President of the Des Moines City Railway Company.
** Secretary of the Greater Des Moines Committee

real burlesque, as you like it, without any camouflage

Oliver Herford (c1880). Public Domain.

Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, p. 234-235—

National Winter Garden. Speaking between the acts—someone had said, apropos of some risqué Broadway comedy, that when he wanted to hear “dubble-entenders,” he would rather go to the National Winter Garden. “Because here’s where you get burlesque as you like it, without any camouflage—sincere dubble-entenders.”

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

a broken fragment of rainbow / a crazy patchwork quilt

J. Milo Courzy, A CLIPPER SHIPPER, in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 16, 1927, p. 6—

When the Buccaneer Club of New York combed the seas for a master worthy of their ship, Captain [Thomas Orlando] Moon’s adventurous achievements won him the coveted command. The clubship is the five-masted barketine Buccaneer, now docked in Brooklyn. The club is composed of men of means and artists and writers who have won fame.

Ship-shaped parade float (not the Buccaneer), 1918

…The Buccaneer now lies in a Brooklyn drydock, where she is donning a holiday dress—a dress of many colors, that looks like a crazy-patch quilt. She will be a floating rainbow, a carnival of color that will make the sea dragons pale. With hull painted in broad bands of white, yellow, black and red, with red and ochre sails and masts gleaming in olive and tipped with white, she will resemble a broken fragment of rainbow fallen to the surface of the sea—a chameleon ship, flying a pirate’s flag.

The idea belongs to Joseph Cummings Chase, artist and pioneer in the art of camouflage during the World War; Professor Ezra Winter, former Yale professor [and WWI ship camoufleur]; and Henry Killum Murphy, architect. These form a committee whose task it is to turn the ship into a masquerading privateer in harlequin garb, flying the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger.

…[Captain] Moon scorns the Buccaneer Club’s fantasies. “They’re turning a good ship into a cure for the color blind. The club’s notions have made us all as crazy as a cat without claws in hell!” he growls. 

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Was there really a men's social club in NYC called The Buccaneer Club? Haven't found one so far. And did they dazzle-paint a ship? Don't know. But Joseph Cummings Chase, Ezra Winter, and Henry Killum Murphy were genuine people, although never before have I heard of contributions to camouflage by Chase.

Camouflage Artist | Charles Bittinger

Anon, painting of a WWI US dazzle-camouflaged ship (1918).

American artist-scientist Charles Bittinger was born on June 27, 1879. Originally from Washington DC, he studied for two years at MIT, with the intention of becoming a scientist. He then switched to painting, and went off to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and other French schools. There he married a concert singer named Edith Gay, and returned to the US to study at the Art Students League. 

During World War I, he was one of the artists who studied at a camouflage training school established in New York by William Andrew MacKay (Yates 1919). He also worked for the US Navy at Eastman Kodak Laboratories with physicist Loyd A. Jones on the development of ship camouflage.

Camouflaged USS Zirkel (1918), digital coloring

Between the wars, Bittinger relocated to Washington DC, and began to experiment with the use of science in making art. In 1929, he painted three murals for the Franklin Institute, depicting stages in the life of Benjamin Franklin. When observed in incandescent light, each painting appeared to be a certain picture, but when viewed under ultraviolet light, it appeared to be an entirely different picture. In 1935, Bittinger exhibited another work in which Charles Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic flight appeared under normal viewing conditions, but the same painting became the Mona Lisa when viewed through an optical instrument that Bittinger had invented.

The following is an excerpt from Literary Digest (1921) that talks about his tandem use of art and science for inventive purposes:

…Charles Bittinger, a scientist who is primarily an artist, has hit upon the idea of utilizing these differences, increasing them where possible and making them serve his purpose. During the war Mr. Bittinger served in the department of camouflage of the United States Navy, conducting experiments in reflection and transmission of light-waves. By means of the spectro-photometer, he established the reflective powers of a number of pigments and dyes that had invisible spectral differences, and, with a palette set with paintings similar in color when seen in a white light, but contrasting sharply in degrees of light and dark when seen under a red light, painted his two-fold pictures, using round brushes for one series of paints and triangular ones for the other, to avoid confusion in the work.…

In Mr. Bittinger’s New York studio is a miniature stage set with a scene on the Riviera, which immediately changes to Madison Square in winter when the red light is switched on. Costumes, too, can be handled in endless effective ways by applying the principle to the dyes used and to the patterns in which the colors are put on. A chorus might come dancing on in dresses with horizontal stripes. The light changes—and instantly the stripes are vertical…

Mr. Bittinger has painted an airplane wing with the German cross upon it, which when viewed by our army through binoculars equipped with a red filter, discloses itself to be not the German cross, but the red, white and blue of the Allies. Thus an airplane could fly unscathed over the German lines and return home again without being fired upon.

Bittinger's research was also described scientifically by Walter Clark (1939) as follows:

Some observations by Bittinger may be mentioned in connection with the separation by photographic means of two colors which are visually identical. He selected paints having predetermined and known reflection characteristics and a spectral difference which was not apparent to the eye. Scenes were painted in these colors, and illuminated with light of one color to produce a certain visual effect. By changing the spectral quality of the light in accordance with the known invisible spectral difference in the paints, he was able to produce an entirely different visual effect. For instance, in one example the painting shows a summer scene when viewed by white light, and an entirely different winter scene when illuminated by red light.

Bittinger (c1931) working on a project for the US Bureau of Standards

In 1937, Bittinger was invited jointly by the US Navy and the National Geographic Society to travel to Canton Island in the Pacific to paint a total solar eclipse. Nearly a decade later, he was the official artist for Operation Crossroads, for which he was one of the artists to paint the first atomic explosion at the Bikini Atoll in 1946. The paintings he made for the latter are posted online here by the US Naval Historical Center.

During World War II, he once again worked on ship camouflage for the U.S. Navy, in which he was the administrative overseer of the research of such camouflage artists as Everett Warner (who was the head of the camouflage team), Bennet Buck, Sheffield H. Kagy, William Walters, Arthur S. Conrad, and Robert Hays. When Bittinger died on December 18, 1970, his obituary in the Washington Post included this statement:

Mr. Bittinger served in the Navy during both world wars, receiving the Legion of Merit in 1946 for his work in the camouflage section of the Bureau of Ships. 

...
Patents by Charles Bittinger
US Patent No. 1,342,247 [June 1, 1920]: Combining Reflected and Transmitted Light Waves of Varying Lengths to Produce Subjective Changes in Scenic Effects.

US Patent No. 1,629,250 [May 17, 1927]: Production and Utilization of Diachronic Inks.

US Patent No. 1,781,999 [March 16, 1929]: Rear View Mirror.
US Patent No. 1,934,310 [with E.O. Hulburt, November 7, 1933]: Visibility Meter and Method of Measuring Visibility.

Sources 

Anon, “Two Paintings in One” in Literary Digest, March 12, 1921, p. 25.
Anon, “First ‘Invisible’ Murals in Franklin Institute” in New York Times, June 8, 1934, p. 14.
Anon, “By Any Other Light” in New York Times, March 3, 1935, p. X18.
Roy R. Behrens, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009, pp. 54-57.
Roy R. Behrens, ed., Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2012.
Charles Bittinger, “Naval Camouflage” in US Naval Proceedings, October 1940, pp. 1394-1398.
“Charles Bittinger, 91, Dies” (obituary) in Washington Post, December 20, 1970, p. B12.
Walter Clark, Photography by Infra-Red: Its Principles and Application. New York: John Wiley, 1939.
Raymond Francis Yates, “The Science of Camouflage Explained” in Everyday Engineering Magazine, March 1919, pp. 253-256 (reprinted in Behrens 2012).

Camouflage | Organic Inevitability of Abstraction

Hypothetical dazzle camouflage / Part One and Part Two

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2017) devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating a single detail from each of various paintings, made by artists from the past (only one artist appears twice).

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Margaret Vandenburg, An American in Paris: A Novel. San Francisco CA: Cleis Press, 2001, an excerpt from a fictional conversation between Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway——

"My ambition is to render reality, which is itself a form of autobiography, with unwavering precision," said Picasso.

"How can you say that when your work is often so abstract?" Hemingway asked.

Picasso immediately took offense, "Abstract? Never!"

"But what about your theory about camouflage?" Hemingway insisted. "How the camouflage of each country is different, and how the subtle differences are the signatures of each nationality? And that camouflage itself proves the organic inevitability of modern abstraction?…"

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Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy act—

…I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth. 

That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. 

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild new years eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. 

That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he was... looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth. 

For more on Gertrude Stein, go here>>>

Camouflage Artist | Sheldon Pennoyer

American artist A(lbert) Sheldon Pennoyer (1888-1957) was originally from California. In 1913, he was living in Paris, where he was a student in the Architectural Section of the École des Beaux Arts. When his interests turned to art, he enrolled at the Académie Julian. Soon after, World War I broke out, and he returned to California.

In 1954 he wrote, “World War I found me in the 40th Engineers Camouflage Corps that was forming at Camp American University, Washington DC.” He recalls that one of the major events in the winter of 1917 was “the famous Camoufleurs’ Ball at the New Willard Hotel,”  for which Pennoyer was assigned by his commanding officer, Captain Aymar Embury II, “to build a model of a railroad field gun [shown here] which he wished to use as a centerpiece for his dinner table when he entertained a number of his officers and men before the opening of the ball… Sash pulleys for wheels, heavy cardboard mailing tubes for the gun barrel, plenty of quick-drying camouflage paint and moss representing the grass along the roadbed, tied in fairly closely with all we could see in a photograph we had of a railway gun in France. It had a fake realism quite in keeping with all the deception we, as camoufleurs, were attempting at the time.”•

That same winter, Pennoyer’s unit sailed to France, then traveled by train to Dijon. There, he and several others (with Sherry Edmundson Fry in the lead) were assigned by Embury to function as a liaison to the French camouflage section. In that capacity, one of his most challenging requests was to camouflage a massive fourteen-inch naval railway gun, with a firing range of up to thirty miles.

A lifelong railroad enthusiast, Pennoyer was especially known for his depictions of subjects related to railroads.

• Pennoyer, Sheldon (1954), Locomotives in Our Lives: Railroad Experiences of Three Brothers For More Than Sixty Years, 1890-1951. New York: Hastings House, pp. 26-34.

Camouflage Artist | Manley Dewitt Barber

Charles & Anna Drain House, Drain OR

Above Charles and Anna Drain House (1893-1895) in Drain OR, designed by George F. Barber, brother of Manley D. Barber. Wikimedia.

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Anon, CAMOUFLAGE IN WAR BY DEKALB COUNTY BOY: Sergeant Manley D. Barber Of American Camouflage Section Describes Some of Strange Operations Employed to Deceive the Germans in the True Republican (Sycamore IL), March 8, 1919—

Camouflage, which has from the beginning of the World War been an important feature of the operations, is something entirely new as carried on in this war, and of more importance than ever before in warfare. Special troops have devoted all their energies to it, and the work of the American Camouflage Section both in the Navy and along the battle lines has excited wonder and admiration. A member of the American Camouflage Section, 40th Engineers, was Sergeant Manley D. Barber, former DeKalb boy and well-known in Sycamore being a relative of the pioneer David West and Love families of Sycamore. He describes some of his regiment’s camouflage operations in a clear and interesting manner in the Knoxville Journal, published at Knoxville TN, where he now makes his home.

After giving an account of the statement of his comrade Private Cooper the paper states: Sergeant Barber was with Private Cooper until February of 1918. He left Dijon and went to Nancy for training with the French. This training was similar to that which we received at home, only more practical and illustrated with frequent trips to the front, said Sergeant Barber. We had frequent air raids during the time I was at Nancy. After the training there, we were sent immediately to the Front. I was in the Toul sector. That was in the time of the old trench warfare, when the line was practically fixed and there was no rapid charging as in the Argonne-Meuse drive. Camouflage is really more effective in defensive than in offensive fighting for the reason that heavy camouflage material cannot be moved easily enough to keep up with a rapidly advancing army. We had to camouflage pill boxes, concrete protections for machine guns. These were sometimes below the surface, but often six feet above ground. We had to cover these with camouflage sheets in stair-steps; that is, there were a series of sheets, each smaller than the other and about five feet apart. This arrangement was made so that the shadow of the upper layers would be absorbed in the outlines of the lower ones, and no distance shadow would be cast by the whole. Sergeant Barber was in the Chateau Thierry drive and contracted trench fever. He was sent to a hospital behind the lines and reported missing for several weeks .

During the Argonne-Meuse drive there was one instance when camouflage men had to make a forest move, he said. A position was taken just behind a low hill, covered with a young forest, east of Fleiville. The guns were placed on the edge of the forest. The problem was to camouflage the guns and yet make no change in the outline of the woods as it might appear on the enemy's aerial photograph. The only thing to do was to move the forest back far enough to cover the guns and about 100 men in that particular unit, which was 20 or 30 feet. Trees were cut from the grove and stuck up in the mud thickly enough to make it look natural. The guns were covered with underbrush (real material being used wherever possible instead of manufactured camouflage) and the change in the whole when seen from an enemy plane would not have been noticeable. As a result, our guns there were never fired on. Camouflage in the winter is about as easy as in the summer. Of course the foliage on the trees helped to a certain extent in the summer, but then in the open the snow covering the nets stretched across the trenches or artillery centers aided quite as much. One of the greatest helps in the study of camouflage was the aerial photograph. That was what we had to deal with in regard to the enemy. In practicing the use of the different kinds of camouflage our own men made pictures of our work and let us see the real effect on an aerial picture. The pictures were usually made at a distance of about a mile and a half. Enemy planes hardly ever dared come any nearer than this because of the anti-aircraft guns.

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There is online information about WWI camoufleur Manley Dewitt Barber at the 2007 Knox Heritage George Barber Homes Trolley Tour.  Manley Barber was the brother of George Franklin Barber, a prominent residential architect first in DeKalb IL, and then in Knoxville TN from 1888 until his death in 1915. By the end of the 19th century, George Barber’s architectural firm was the largest in the state. Thirty-five of his elaborate Victorian houses are still standing in Knoxville, with hundreds of others across the country, and in Canada, Japan, China and the Philippines. The Manley Dewitt Barber House (designed in 1905 by George Barber for his brother) is at 1620 Washington Avenue in Knoxville.

According to the online source—

After moving to Knoxville in 1903, Manley worked with George in the architectural firm of Barber and Klintz, and also spent time as a contractor and builder. Manley was best known as a collector of shells and fossils. He found many new specimens which he sent to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC to be named; three specimens were named after him and his collection is said to have been the largest in the United States in 1928. 

Oliver Percy Bernard | Camoufleur and Scenographer

Oliver Percy Bernard (c1915)

The RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915. It sank in 18 minutes, eleven miles off the southern coast of Ireland. Among the fatalities were 1,198 passengers and crew, including 128 American citizens. Among the survivors was a British architect and stage designer named Oliver Percy Bernard, who gained importance later as an Art Deco interior designer. But he also played a significant role in World War I British army camouflage. When the Lusitania sank, Bernard was moving back to London from Boston.

On May 8, there was an article in the Boston Post, with the headline ARTIST AMONG PASSENGERS: Oliver Bernard in Boston All Winter. It included a photograph of Bernard (above), accompanied by the following text—

Oliver Bernard, one of the passengers on the Lusitania, lived with Dr, and Mrs. Arial W. George of 38 Winchester Street, Brookline, from last October until he sailed for England.

Mr. Bernard was the director and resident artist of the Royal Opera House, London. He was also the business manager of the English Players, who were in Boston some weeks ago.

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About twenty years later, Bernard (known to friends as “Bunny”) published an autobiography, titled Cock Sparrow: A True Chronicle [WorldCat lists it as fiction] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). Bernard was small and terribly hard of hearing, and the title refers to the slanderous name that he had been given by bullies. We have searched for a copy of his autobiography for years, either to buy or to borrow. Interlibrary loan requests have not been successful. When it first came out, there was the following brief review in the Sydney Morning Herald (July 25, 1936), p. 12—

Mr. Oliver Bernard is now a successful interior decorator in London, but his training for that position is by no means like most others of his colleagues. For that reason, his autobiography makes fascinating reading. We see the successful decorator as a small and unhappy boy, as an assistant in a scenery painting studio, as a deck-hand on a Norwegian windjammer, as an American stage designer, and, finally, as a camouflage expert during the war. In the interval of following these various activities, Mr. Bernard also went down with the Lusitania, about which experience he writes illuminatingly, and formulated his own design for living. In revealing the stages of this mental growth he is not so successful as when chronicling the highlights of his adventures. It is, perhaps, those very adventures and their variety which have left him a little muddled, and, consequently, his literary method tends toward diffuseness. But as a camouflage expert reconciling the arts of war and the arts of painting, he has such an unusual and interesting topic that the book becomes really worthwhile. Indeed, he feels so himself, for he devotes most of his chapters to the war years, and leaves the chronicle of his life at that point.

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To date, the best, most detailed discussion of Bernard’s contributions as a British camoufleur (short of someday obtaining his memoir) is in Nicholas Rankin’s excellent book, A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars (UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).  See also War and Theatrical Innovation (2017).

To avoid confusion, it helps to know that Oliver Percy Bernard had a son who is also cited as Oliver Bernard, known for his translations of Arthur Rimbaud.

RELATED LINKS

• Optical science meets visual art
• Disruption versus dazzle
• Chicanery and conspicuousness
• Under the big top at Sims' circus

Edward Morton | More Milwaukee Camouflage

Restoration of WPA mural by Edward Morton (1938)

Above A Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural (titled Winter Sports) by Wisconsin artist Edward Morton, commissioned in 1938 by the US Government for permanent installation in the post office at Oconomowoc WI. In the 1970s, the mural was taken down and thereafter kept in the basement. Fortunately, it was restored in 2003, and is once again on public display in the post office.

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Many years ago, we taught for more than a decade at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. So did an aging artist named Edward Morton, who was then an adjunct instructor of drawing. I had just published a book on art and camouflage. If I had known better, I would have talked to him at length, in part because one day he said that he had served as an army camoufleur during World War II. I didn't follow up on it. He has long since died—and now I have plenty of questions to ask.

A few weeks ago, I ran across an article from the Milwaukee Sentinel (December 11, 1944), which includes a photograph of the young Ed Morton, home on leave from the army, painting a portrait of his wife. Here's what the article says, followed by the news photo—

On leave from camp at Maldon MO, Sergeant Edward L. Morton turned from painting things that do not exist to painting things that are real. In the army, Sgt. Morton is a camoufleur, but in civilian life he was an instructor at [Milwaukee's Layton School of Art] and won prizes for his own work at State Fair art shows. Here he is completing a portrait of his wife Dorothy, at the home of her parents…

Edward L. Morton, US Army camoufleur (1944)

Camouflaged Hollywood Special Effects WWI

Above In accounts of World War I US Army camouflage, most credit is given to artists, usually painters and sculptors. But in fact, recruits who served as camoufleurs came from a wide range of career backgrounds, with calls for volunteers among architects, house painters, sign painters, carpenters and theatrical set designers. As these photos confirm, even Hollywood film set designers contributed to the development of duplicitous battlefield special effects. (This is not a genuine functioning cannon—it's a dummy theatre prop. The firing of the gun is simulated, and the buildings are scenery settings.) National Archives and Records Administration (c1918).

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C.C. Lyon, PERSHING NEEDS ARTISTS TO MAKE SOLDIERS LOOK LIKE TREES AND ROCKS in Waterloo Times-Tribune (Waterloo IA), June 13, 1918, p, 6—

The "Camouflage" section of our army has been developed until it is now a most important adjunct.

We need men who can create costumes that will make soldiers look like straw stacks; snipers look like old tree trunks; and railroad trains like babbling books.

…The other day I met a famous American sculptor dressed in the uniform of an American private.

"I've joined the camouflage section," he laughed. "…it was about time I turned my talents to the good of my country.

I put in my days making odd things that will fool the Germans. The easiest things to make with clay and plaster are huge shells that, when properly painted and treated with substances resembling moss, will look like old rocks embedded in the hillsides. Our snipers can get inside and spot German heads when they show over the tops of their trenches."…

"The other day," he said, "another sculptor in the camouflage section completed a figure of a soldier and dressed it in an American uniform. At the front, the figure was used to draw the enemy's fire and thereby locate the positions of his snipers.

"He laid the figure in a dark corner of our workshop, and it looked like one of our camouflagers had sneaked off to take a little nap.

"Pretty soon the captain came along and discovered this soldier snoozing in the corner. He shook him none too gently. 'Get out of here and get to work; what do you think this is, a hotel?' he bellowed.

"When the sleeper refused to move, the captain took him my the collar and assisted him to his feet—and looked him squarely in the eye.

"Then he laid him gently down again and looked around to see if anybody had witnessed the performance."…

[These camoufleurs] are adept in figuring out costumes that will fool the Germans.

With them, hay, straw, grass, moss and mud are much used materials. They're able to make a covering for a sniper that will make him look like a pile of muddy rocks along the roadside. And it's a good idea for all concerned—allied as well as the Germans—to carefully examine hay and straw stacks, wheat shocks and even wood piles, because in the world of camouflage nothing is what it seems to be.

I saw an ordinary looking woodpile one day last winter, and lamented the fact that so much valuable fuel should be going to waste with the thermometer below zero. On closer inspection it proved to be a bullet-proof barricade behind which allied machine gunners could command a very important road.

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There is more information on the contribution to wartime camouflage of theatrical designers in an earlier post.

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.   

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Ship Camouflage and Nature Talk / Hartman Reserve

Above Title slide for a richly illustrated talk that will take place this weekend at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Cedar Falls IA. The 50-minute talk begins at 2:00 pm, Sunday, February 10, 2019* and is free and open to the public at the center's Interpretive Building. It focuses on the connection between turn-of-the-century studies of animal camouflage (called protective coloration then) and the development of military camouflage by artists during World War I.

*PLEASE NOTE This event has been postponed because of winter weather. It has been rescheduled for 2:00 pm, Sunday, April 14, 2019. Perfect timing in view of its Easter-themed title.

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NEWS OF THE SCHOOLS: Navy Camoufleur at Manual. Brooklyn Daily Eagle. May 6, 1919, p. 14—

Alon Bement, a camoufleur, first class, of the United States Shipping Board, and formerly a teacher at the Teachers’ College, Columbia University, was the speaker at the Senior Assembly of the Manual Training High School yesterday. At the beginning of the war Mr. Bement, who had considerable reputation as an artist, was called to act as a naval camoufleur. He was sent to Washington where he worked out designs for camouflaging ships, using small models for the purpose. If the designers were found to be feasible, they were reproduced on a linen sheet, taken to a shipyard and painted on a ship.

Mr. Bement went into detail to show how portions of the ship were marked out for certain colors by means of a hand mirror when the sun was shining. The camoufleur would stand on the edge of the drydock and reflect the light along the lines which were intended to mark the borders of the various colors. In this way the apportioning off of the ship was readily accomplished.

Mr. Bement told of other schemes which were attempted to combat the submarine menace such as the construction of an outer hull to prematurely explode the torpedo. This means was hastily abandoned because such a hull would slow down the ship to such an extent that it would fall an easy prey to the U-boats.

He also explained why only the transports, freighters and destroyers wore camouflage and not battleships. The big fighters were not daily subject to submarine attack so that it was unnecessary to give them their “make-up” and since it costs $3,000 to paint a battleship, attention was confined to the first mentioned ships.

Mr. Bement told of how in a captured German U-boat, the British found fifty-eight pages of a leaflet in the commander’s cabin, telling what methods the Prussians were taking to combat the camouflage of Allied ships. With this find, the Allied camoufleurs were able to take new steps to offset the year’s calculations of the Germans.

Chelsea Arts Club Dazzle Ball 1919

The Sketch (March 19, 1919)

Among artists, designers and architects, there is a long tradition of sponsoring annual costume balls, fancy dress balls, or Beaux-Arts balls (not unlike the Mardi Gras), often amusingly raucous events, for the purpose of fundraising. At a Beaux-Arts ball in New York in 1931, for example, some of the city's most famous architects came dressed in costumes that were modeled after their own famous buildings. Among artists, given their fabled Bohemian bent, these parties typically turned into riotous fests of uninhibited and inebriated revelers, dressed in astonishing costumes (or, sometimes, barely dressed at all).

One of these events was the annual Chelsea Arts Ball in England, which the Chelsea Arts Club (founded in 1891) had sponsored at the Royal Albert Hall. The annual celebration was interrupted by World War I, which began in 1914, and only near the end of the war, in 1919, was it decided that the Chelsea Arts Ball could resume. This time however the theme chosen was the disruptive crazy-quilt patterns that had been applied to wartime dazzle-painted ships, intermixed with the public's bewilderment toward emerging styles of Modern Art: Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Surrealism and Dada. As a result, the 1919 fancy dress ball (held on the evening of March 12, 1919) became known as the Chelsea Arts Club's Dazzle Ball.

The event was widely covered by newspaper and magazine articles, as had been an earlier American "camoufleurs' ball" that took place in the winter of 1917 at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC, and a camoufleurs' "carnival ball" (sponsored by the League of American Penwomen) that was also held in Washington in February 1919. We've discussed these events in earlier blogposts, including an account of a comparable dazzle ball (modeled after the Chelsea Arts Club festival) that took place in Sydney AU on October 7, 1919.

In its March 22 issue, the Illustrated London News featured a spread of illustrations of the costumes and the dancing that had taken place at the Chelsea Arts Club's Dazzle Ball. A few days earlier, in its March 19 issue, The Sketch included on its front cover photographs of costumes that premiered that night (see cover reproduced above). At the bottom of the cover is a headline that reads THE GREAT "DAZZLE" BALL OF THE CHELSEA ARTS CLUB; HUMAN CAMOUFLAGE, and below that is this paragraph—

After an interval of five years, the Chelsea Arts Club once more gave a great fancy dress ball, last Wednesday, March 12. The Albert Hall was decorated for the occasion with a wonderful scheme of "Dazzle," as used in naval camouflage during the war, and a great many of the costumes were designed on similar lines. A good example is seen in the left-hand lower photograph, showing Mrs. Bertram Park (neé Yvonne Gregory), who is well-known as a painter of miniatures.

That portrait of Yvonne Gregory Park (she herself was also a photographer), which was taken by her husband British photographer Bertram Park, is easily the best-known photograph of a costume from the Dazzle Ball. Equally wonderful is the photograph at the bottom right of the cover, showing two women, one draped in the American flag, the other in the Union Jack.

In the same issue of The Sketch (listed by HathiTrust Digital Library as in public domain in the US) is another full page of costumes, on page 353 (as shown below), this time with the page headline ON THE RAZZLE DAZZLE: COSTUMES AT THE CHELSEA ARTS and then at the bottom of the page, a smaller second headline reads: THE "DAZZLE" BALL OF THE CHELSEA ARTS CLUB, AT THE ALBERT HALL: SOME NOTABLE FIGURES, followed by this paragraph—

The Sketch (March 19, 1919)

As already mentioned, the Chelsea Arts Ball on March 12 was a wonderful success. The Albert Hall presented literally a "Dazzling" spectacle. Our central photograph shows Miss Margot Kelly, who recently left "Oh, Joy," at the Kingsway, to appear shortly in a new American comedy. She is wearing a Columbine dress of her own design. To the left of her is Mrs. Barribal, wife of a well-known artist whose work is familiar to our readers, in a costume which she made from an armchair cover.

On page 355 of that same magazine, there is a brief article (attributed to "The Worldling") that is titled The Chelsea Arts Ball and reads as follows—

It was a case of "dazzle-dazzle, joy and jazzle" at the Albert Hall last Wednesday night, when the long-heralded folic of the Chelsea Arts Club came off. As all the world knows, the scheme of decoration was based on the art of "Dazzle," as applied during the war to the disguising of ships and the discomfiture of U-boats. The same artists who did that work for the Admiralty—Lieutenant-Commander Norman Wilkinson, Lieutenant Cecil King, [American] Captain Burnell Poole, and Sergeant [Walter E.] Webster—had undertaken to camouflage the Albert Hall in similar style for the great occasion. The background was a "dazzle" battleship, with a "dazzle" sunset, and all the boxes were hung with muslin draperies in "disruptive" colors. The "dazzling" of the dancers themselves was left, of course, to their own individual ingenuity, and many artists had designed costumes for the camouflage of the human form. The effect was a whirling scene that delighted the hearts of the Vorticists.

In advance of the Dazzle Ball, The Sketch had published a page of preparatory drawings of four of the anticipated costumes, on page 292, on March 5 (in those drawings, Yvonne Gregory Bertram's striped costume is referred to as the "jazzle"). Following the event, a further, briefer note (underscoring the contributions of Cecil King and Walter E. Webster by name) appeared on page xii of the March 26 issue of The Sketch.

Apparently, The Sketch was enjoying a lively reader response to its features on the Dazzle Ball, and indeed it returned to the subject again in a cartoon (attributed to Thorpe) on p. 427 of the June 25 issue. Reproduced below, the headline of the cartoon reads: THE EVE OF THE FANCY-DRESS BALL, while the caption beneath it is worded IT'S A WISE CHILD THAT KNOWS ITS OWN MOTHER.

The Sketch (June 25, 1919)

There's much more to this—but we'll save it for a future post.