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Captain William J. Aylward
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Until recently, I don't think I had heard of American artist
William J. Aylward (1875-1956). I should have, since he was born and raised in Milwaukee, where I lived and taught for a decade. On the other hand, he left Milwaukee for the East as early as 1903, and his prominence was diminished because, throughout his career, he was dismissed as an illustrator (a commercial or advertising artist) not as a privileged fine artist.
It was interesting to find that Aylward was the son of a Milwaukee Great Lakes ship captain, which explains in part his lifelong fascination with ships and related nautical themes. He served in World War I, not as a
camouflage artist, but (as shown in the photograph above) as an official government
war artist, which means that he was assigned to complete onsite drawings and paintings of wartime settings and events.
Back in Milwaukee, long before WWI broke out, he had been associated with illustrator
Arthur Becher, with whom he was one of the founders of the Milwaukee Art Students League. Later known as the Milwaukee Art Society, among its well-known members were
Edward Steichen,
Carl Sandburg (Steichen’s brother-in-law), and the painter and sculptor
Louis Mayer. Together, Becher and Aylward decided to study illustration with
Howard Pyle’s school in Wilmington NJ. Soon after, their lifelong careers began as two of the country’s finest magazine illustrators.
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| William J. Aylward |
Throughout his life, Aylward produced illustrations for such famous books as
Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
Jack London’s
The Sea Wolf, and various others. His wartime work was especially accomplished. Reproduced above is his painting of American troops on the move in France during WWI, with a camouflaged truck in the foreground. Below are three full-color paintings (watercolor and charcoal) of wartime harbor settings, completed in France in 1919. Included in each are portions of a camouflaged ship.
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| William J. Aylward |
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| William J. Aylward |
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| William J. Aylward |
