WWI camouflage artist / taxidermist Louis Paul Jonas

Taxidermy Hall of Fame

It certainly comes as no surprise that a person who practices taxidermy would also be interested in the appearance of animals, in protective coloration, mimicry, and camouflage. Over the years, I’ve run across any number of naturalists, museum exhibit designers, ornithologists, and wildlife artists, who, at one time or another, have contributed to the study of camouflage in nature. Some have even served during wartime as camouflage consultants.

Shown above is a photograph of the well-known museum display of a group of African elephants in the Akeley Hall of the American Museum of Natural History. It was completed by a famous naturalist, taxidermist and sculptor named Carl Akeley, who collaborated on it with one of his prominent students, the sculptor and museum exhibit designer Louis Paul Jonas (1894-1971). Born in Budapest, Hungary, Jonas initially worked with his two older brothers, who owned a taxidermy studio in Denver (eventually there were five brothers in the firm). After moving to New York, he established his own studio, and created admired exhibits in more than 50 museums throughout the world.

I want to focus on Louis Paul Jonas because I hadn’t realized that, during World War I, he served in the US Army’s Camouflage Corps. I learned this only recently from a news article titled MONSTER MAKER, so-titled because he had been commissioned by the Sinclair Oil Company to build full-size fiberglas models of dinosaurs for the New York World’s Fair.

In that article (published in the Barrytown Explorer, Barrytown NY, on October 1, 1963, p. 4), it states that Jonas bought a 120-acre farm near Churchtown NY “and gradually made over the barns and stables into studios, and built up a staff from among his Columbia County neighbors. Now he has a staff of 16 experts, all trained by himself. One he found in a Hudson shirt factory, a young Italian who had been a mold maker in a ceramics works back home; several were members of an Adult Education class in sculpture conducted by Jonas in connection with the Hudson school system—bricklayers, housewives, and factory workers among them; three came to him via the GI Training Program, and the rest are members of his own family, including his ‘key man,’ Louis Paul Jonas Jr.” An extraordinary person obviously.