charts explaining the purpose of WWI ship camouflage

Cover image showing Everett L. Warner

An odd and totally unexpected find: I’ve run across a person named Robert Gregory Gifford (1894-1962). He was an American portrait painter, who appears to have resided most of his life in New England (West Medford and Duxbury MA), New York City, and possibly in Louisville KY.

During World War I, it appears that he worked with the US Navy’s Camouflage Section in 1917-18 in Washington DC. He can be found in newspaper archives because he was prone to writing letters to the editor. In one of those (in Camouflage and Sea in The Boston Herald, November 19, 1933, p. 10), he writes as follows—

During the World War, I was given special duties by naval authorities in Washington to compose charts explaining the fundamental purpose of camouflage, so that all officers on ships and in army headquarters would not be so befuddled as to what it was all about. Although but just out of my “teens,” I found it to be a very serious hindrance in the conduct of martial affairs to have certain scientific, over-practical officials treat the subject lightly, because their training had precluded knowledge of the subject, when it was essential that pilots know why certain razzle-dazzle designs appeared to throw a vessel several points off her course, and why our aerial bombers did not know something about the uncanny European artistry of obscuring cannon locations and so on.

More complete information about Gifford and his wartime assignment has so far been a challenge. In addition to portrait painting, he was apparently also an etcher, newspaper and magazine illustrator, stage set designer, bookplate designer, teacher, and writer. He seems to have studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fenway School of Illustration, Livingston Pratt Stage Design School, and the New York School of Applied Art.

He registered for the draft on June 5, 1917, in Plymouth County MA, at which time he gave his birth year as 1894, not 1895, as is mistakenly cited in various biographical notes. In a newspaper article (Boston Globe, August 14, 1919, p. 11), his artwork is listed as included in a 1919 Duxbury exhibit which also featured artworks by (among others, including several camoufleurs) Charles Bittinger and Everett Longley Warner, both of whom would have been among Gifford’s supervisors in his camouflage-related work.