the deserved jot / a decided if non-dazzling personality

WWII German ship camouflage

Above Dutch photograph of a World War II, dazzle-camouflaged German ship (1944). Hypothetical colors applied, using AI, it should not be assumed to be historically accurate. Note that the camouflage application had not yet been completed.

•••

John Walker Harrington, HART, THE RELENTLESS SCRUTINIZER OF AMERICAN PORTRAITS: He destroyed some illusions, but he helped to increase the fame of our early artists, in The New York Sun, August 8, 1918—

Charles Henry Hart, sharp of eye and agile of wit, never gave up an opinion once formed on full investigation, and he was beloved and hated according to the way his views chanced to square or clash with those with whom he came in contact. As one who knew him, I am venturing to write these lines about him because nobody misunderstood him, and therefore, taken all in all, he was a most unpopular man. There is danger, owing to his decided personality, and also because in these days art has given way to dazzle and camouflage, that the great service which this man did for American art will be forgotten for a time. Likewise, fifty years from now there is no likelihood of posterity neglecting to give every jot of credit he deserved to Charles Henry Hart. [As of today, it has been over one hundred years since Harrington wrote this, and there is neither hide nor hair of Hart—nor of Harrington.]

USS Leviathan in a WWI engraving by Bernardt Wall

Bernhardt Wall (1918)

Above An etching by American illustrator Bernhardt Wall (1872-1956), titled Seagate 1918. In the foreground are two small children, making a sand castle. Of the ships on the water in the background, the central, largest one is the USS Leviathan. It is painted in an elaborate dazzle camouflage, designed by British camoufleur Norman Wilkinson. It had initially been a German ship called the Vaterland, but was seized by the US Shipping Board when the US entered World War I in April 1917. For the rest of the war it was used for transporting troops, making ten rounds between Hoboken NJ and several European ports, carrying more than 119,000 troops. A photograph of the Leviathan’s port side camouflage is shown below. 

USS Leviathan

• Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k>

• Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM>

• Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4>

• Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y>

latest terpsichorean fads in WWI wartime dancing

“CAMOUFLAGE WALTZ” AND “AIRPLANE SPIN” LATEST TERPSICHOREAN STEPS in The Des Moines Register (Des Moines IA), June 11, 1918—

Chicago, June 10—The “trench trot,” the “camouflage waltz” and the “cantonment canter” have displaced the gavotte, the minuet and the old fashioned waltz, it was declared today at the convention of the International Dancing Masters’ Association. Other new dances displayed were the “war stamp" and the “airplane spin.” Plans were announced for a dancing masters’ union which will soon embark for France to instruct American soldiers regarding the newest steps.

• Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k>

• Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM>

• Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4>

• Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y>

the debate about who originated WWI camouflage

Above World War I photograph (c1914) of four members of the French camouflage squad described in the news article below. They are (l to r) Èugene Jean-Baptiste Corbin, Louis Guingot, Henri Royer, and (seated in front) Henri Ronsin. If this article is accurate, Corbin may have been the first of the French camoufleurs to experiment not only with field camouflage, but with naval camouflage as well. Confusingly, it is often said that the originator of French camouflage was Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola who apparently arrived at the same idea, independently of Corbin. Combining their findings, they became a single team, but it was Guirand de Scévola who managed the first camouflage workshop at Toule, and who persuaded the French command to establish a section de camouflage.

•••

HONOR INVENTOR OF CAMOUFLAGE: French Officials Recognize Genius of Eugene Corbin Who Aided World War in The Portsmouth Times (Portsmouth OH), October 6, 1935, p. 12—

Paris, Oct. 5—Eugene Corbin, inventor of the system of camouflage used in the World War, finally has received recognition from the French government for his work.

In August 1914, Corbin, now 65 years old and the weathy director of a big department store chain, was mobilized as a noncommissioned officer. Three days after he reached the front the idea of putting war materials in “disguise” came to him. It was later adopted by all the allied and enemy armies and became one of the most striking characteristics of the World War.

One day, as Corbin tells it, he learned that three of his friends were blown to pieces by an airplane bomb while manning a field gun. He remembered that years before he had experimented with many-colored costumes while hunting so as not to scare away animals. He thought the scheme might work to disguise field guns from enemy planes and his colonel gave him permission to experiment.

Corbin first rounded up a squad to help him. Louis Guingot, a prominent portrait painter, and Henri Ronsin, decorator of the Paris Opera were his first aids. Together they painted the first canvas to hide a field gun and its gunners from German planes. They were given an automobile and complete painting equipment plus the use of a vacant department store in Toul. Soon their staff grew and idle factories throughout France were opened to pratictioners in the new science of camouflage. The first design never varied throughout the war.

Corbin directed painting of the first warship and first transport, examples of camouflage which were to become familiar to American citizens throughout the war. His invention was applied to everything used in army and navy life, from guns, hangars, tanks to armored cars, trucks and railroad cars.

Corbin has been active throughout his life in the interests of what he calls “real art,” apart from the crude system of painting that he originated. For some years he has supported a colony of artists and sculptors in his native Lorraine and his private art collection numbers more than 10,000 objects which he has collected for 35 years.

Èugene Jean-Baptiste Corbin

WWI British camouflaged ship in Southhampton water

Geoffrey S. Allfree (1918)

On pages 88-89 of James Taylor’s book, Dazzle: Disguise and disruption in war and art (Pool of London, 2016), on a facing full-page spread, there is a striking reproduction of a painting of a dazzle-painted British ship, A dazzled oiler with escort (1918), by Geoffrey S. Allfree (1889-1918). He was not a camouflage artist per se, but was commissioned during World War I by the Imperial War Museum to document wartime subjects. 

Of those paintings, my own favorite is a watercolor on paper (shown above), titled Camouflaged ship in Southhampton water (1917). As can be skillfully achieved in watercolor, there is a freshness and immediacy that makes it seem to have come about with all but little effort.

During the war, Allfree was a Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Vounteer Reserve. He died at sea on September 29, 1918, at age 29. Earlier in the same year, he had been designated as the official painter for the Royal Navy. He is the grandfather of composer, musicologist, and scholar Joscelyn Godwin, Professor of Music Emeritus at Colgate University.

cut-out silhouettes of skunks / embedded figures

Cut-out silhouettes of skunks

Above In a recently posted video on Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (2021) I demonstrate the use of cut-out silhouettes by American artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, who worked in collaboration with his son, Gerald H. Thayer, in the study of protective coloration in nature. 

[During World War I] Thayer objected to the use of field service uniforms of plain, one-color fabric. He thought it was better to break it up, to counter the shading from overhead light, and to generally make it confusing.

At some point, he announced that he had come up with a simple method by which any soldier, in any setting, could determine his own best camouflage pattern. This too made use of cut-out silhouettes. All a soldier needed to do, Thayer proposed, is to cut out a silhouette of his own figure (or the generic shape of a man), and to study the colors and patterns that appeared in the hole of the figure when observed in his surroundings. He had already explored this photographically to recreate the patterns of, for example, birds and skunks [as shown above]…more>>>

• Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k>

• Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM>

• Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4>

• Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y>

skilled cosmetic camouflage / disguised injured optics

James Montgomery Flagg (1905)

Above James Montgomery Flagg (best-known for his I Want You Uncle Sam poster), Cover illustration (with embedded figure or visual pun) for Life magazine, March 23, 1905.

•••

Abel Warshawsky, The memories of an American Impressionist. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1980, p. 30—

One Sunday, when as usual we were on our way to dine at the Kroll’s house, Leon Kroll surprised us by revealing an unsuspected side of his character. We were passing through a tough neighborhood after a heavy fall of snow, when we came upon a band of young roughs mercilessly pelting an old man with snowballs. When we tried to interfere, the band of hooligans turned on us, and we were obliged to make a fight for it. Kroll, who was of small physioque, was our first casualty. An old shoe, hitting him on the head, bowled him over down the area steps where we had taken our stand. In a moment, he was back, blazing with the lust of battle, a veritable David ready to slay his tens of thousands. His onset was so terrific that the enemy was soon put to flight. But there were several black eyes among us to tell the tale of the Sunday battle, and that evening we were to attend a concert! How to save our telltale faces! It was then we remembered the lower Bowery expert who painted out black eyes, and we proceeded to do likewise, so successfully that no one that evening or the next day noticed the traces of our combat.

Above Anon, detail from a cartoon from The Ogden Standard (Ogden UT), December 3, 1917, p. 11.

George Ross, BLACK EYE CAMOUFLAGE ARTIST TELLS MR. ROSS TWO OUT OF TEN ‘PATIENTS’ ARE WOMEN, in Times Daily (Florence AL), September 21, 1939—

NEW YORK, September 22, 1939—“Doctor” Edward Xiques, an amiable Greek who plies his practice amidst the flop houses on the Bowery, hums “Ch’ chonya” with amusement in his voice. “Ch” chonya” is Russian for “dark eyes” and the song, there, is a musical trademark for Dr. Xiques’ craft. He happens to be the only healer and camouflager of black eyes in the city. Or as his own business card promises, “Black eyes painted natural!”

And business has been rather good lately, As you might surmise, not the bulk of Dr. Xiqies’ trade stems from the flop houses in the nondescript Bowery, but from uptown where vanity is fancied.

He speaks smugly of the folk who have come down in expensive cars from Park Avenue to have shiners camouflaged, and he likes to tell about the silk-sheathed beauties who sneak down to his atelier to have a few bruises and a wounded optic well disguised.

As a matter of fact, two out of ten patients are women. That will give you some idea of the status of chivalry in Manhattan. In a specialized occupation like Dr. Xiques,’ discretion is the better part of valor. For example, he has never smiled when the patient explained that the bedpost, the doorknob or the phone receiver hit him. And he is resigned to the slamming taxi door, also. For save in the cases of unabashed pugilists, none of his patients have ever confessed to being the receiving end of a bare fist.

Disguising a black eye is anart with an orthodox background; the secret has been in Dr. Xiques’ family for three generations—but he is the last, probably, who ever will pursue it. After he bows out, folks will have to go back to raw beefsteaks, through Dr. Xiqus frowns upon a prime cut as an effective curative. He says you may as well decorate a black eye with a filet mignon or entrecote!