American ship camoufleur / Henry Wadsworth Moore

Henry Wadsworth Moore

Recently I’ve run across multiple references to a World War I American ship camoufleur named Henry Wadsworth Moore (1879-1968). He was an artist, as noted in a news article (The Boston Herald, September 8, 1918), who was also “a marine camoufleur with the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the US Shipping Board.” In view of his name, he must have been an aristocrat from New England, and indeed that seems to have been the case. He was the great-grandson of Commodore Alexander Scammell Wadsworth of the frigate US Constitution; and the great-grand nephew of Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth, who served on the US Decatur during its action in Tripoli, and who was the uncle of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “Other ancestors of note,” the article continues, “are General Peleg Wadsworth of Portland ME, and Colonel George Baylor of Virginia, both of whom were on General George Washington’s staff.”

I’ve also found online his WWI draft registration card, dated 1918, when he was age 39. He was living in Brookline MA, and was associated with the US Shipping Board at 45 Bromfield Street in Boston. He can only have served very briefly, because the war soon ended. It is doubtful that he served “abroad during the war,” as claimed in a subsequent article below. Later, in the 1930s, he was associated with the Works Progress Adminstration (WPA), at which time he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Frederick Douglass. Let’s hope it was a finer work than his magazine cover illustration for The Modern Priscilla (1913), as reproduced below.

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BOSTON SALON IS EXHIBITING MOORE’S WORKS in Salt Lake Herald-Republican (Salt Lake City UT), January 31, 1920, p. 2—

Attracting the attention of art connoisseurs from all parts of the east, an exhibition of the latest paintings of Henry Wadsworth Moore is currently being staged at Boston, according to word received in Salt Lake yesterday by the artist’s father-in-law.

Mr. Moore recently married Rosamond Ritchie, daughter of Judge M.L. Ritchie [of Salt Lake City]…

Mrs. Moore is at present with her husband at Boston. The artist passed several months in the service of the naval camouflage service abroad during the war.