One of the earliest, most important contributors to World War I ship camouflage was an American muralist named William Andrew Mackay (1876-1939). He is best known for having created a series of murals about the achievements of Theodore Roosevelt, which are housed in the rotunda of the Roosevelt Memorial Hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In advance of WWI, he began to experiment with optical color mixtures in the camouflage of submarines, which he demonstrated with spinning colored disks that had been developed earlier by James Clerk Maxwell. A detailed, richly illustrated account of Mackay's camouflage-related research is accessible online here, and is also downloadable online here.
• 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>
