not a camoufleur / Maine artist Willard W. Cummings

Willard W. Cummings

So, who actually served as a wartime camoufleur? It’s not always easy to answer. For example, I recently ran across published references to an American artist named Willard W. Cummings (1915-1975). He was a portrait painter, whose prominence is mostly due to having co-founded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. The school was launched in 1946, after World War II had ended, on property his family owned.

Cummings had studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris, the Art Students League in New York, and at Yale University. He served in the US Army during WWII.  

When he died in 1975, an obituary in the New York Times (July 25) reported that “When he joined the Army in 1941 he was put to work painting camouflage.” But that is not entirely true. According to an interview with him, which took place in 1973 and which can now be found online at the Archives of American Art, his role as a camoufleur never panned out. He was sent to Fort Belvoir, where camouflage training was taking place, but instead of actually practicing that, “A colonel asked him to do a portrait, and this led to his being named an official army artist.” The same thing had happened to Norman Rockwell during World War I, when he was reassigned from camouflage to the task of making portraits of the top brass.

In Cummings’ case, it led to postwar commissions in which he painted the portraits of civilian celebrities, among them Bette Davis, Pablo Casals, Margaret Chase Smith (the senator from Maine), and Adali Stevenson. But he was never really a camouflage artist.