William Twigg Smith / New Zealand-born Camoufleur

In earlier blog posts we’ve talked about a New Zealand-born artist, named William Twigg-Smith (1882-1950) who was one of the first members of the American Camouflage Corps during World War I. Through online searches of vintage newspapers, it’s not difficult to find quite a few articles about him. Among the most thorough is a lengthy full page article by Mike Jay titled Twigg Smith Camoufleur: Camouflage Saved France from the Huns, which was published on page 1 of the Magazine Section of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (July 12, 1919). An image of the article (not readable obviously) is reproduced above, and the article’s full text is as follows—

•••

Art for art's sake and camouflage for land's sake!

Camouflage saved the land of France, held the ground time and time again in the big German advances. Without it the gun positions would have been more readily detected by the enemy and progress of the Huns would have been more rapid and swift and perhaps might have fully succeeded. By the time the United States entered the war, France and the French troops knew full well the great life and land value of camouflage.

But to the American officers making their first appearance on the firing line "over there"—well!

"Suffering cats and blue blazes! We're here to fight, not hide! Whadda we want with that old stuff?"

That's the way they talked at the beginning. Then came the first mild shower of shells from an unknown and unseen source miles away and brought them around in double quick time with a request for all that "old stuff" such as wire, nets, burlap, screens, twigs and other material that goes to make up camouflage.

Later on, when these selfsame officers had endured it hot and heavy, their tendency was to swing too far into the other direction and to burrow into the ground for concealment of their guns with the camouflage section of the Fortieth Engineers, AEF.

Though born In Nelson, New Zealand, Smith was to all intents and purposes an American long before he secured his naturalization papers while in France on service for Uncle Sam. He was a student at art schools in San Francisco, Chicago and New York and had visited Honolulu eight or nine times before his start for France in 1917.

He landed on French soil on January 7, 1918, and was sent almost directly to the front. He remained at the front until within three days of the signing of the armistice, when he was ordered to an officers' training camp.

"Talk about trouble, I guess we had ours, all right," he remarks on the subject of camouflage for the American guns In France.

"After experimenting for many weary months with color schemes, different systems of coverings, various styles of screens and other stuff, the American camoufleurs finally decided upon a plan that worked to perfection. Not only could the gun position be hidden from ground observers but so well was the plan worked out that it was absolutely impossible to detect such a position even by photographs from the air.

"The French system of camouflage was on the burrow style with a little opening forward for the gun. The top was screened and carried twigs and other material to give it the appearance of the ground.

"That was fine so long as there was no aerial observation. But a photograph taken from an airplane immediately detected the shadows cast by the hump of the mound and the first thing that happened was a shell In the vicinity from a Hun gun."

After trying some 40 different styles, the American camouflage section decided upon a wire screening with strips of burlap hanging down. There were large open places in the top of this netting which made some of the officers think that it was not effective. But it certainly was. These strips cast a series of mottled shadows that photographed exactly like ground would under a tree and gave it such a natural appearance that it was impossible of detection. That was camouflage carried to the highest degree.

"The color scheme entered into this as well. The French had worked that out nicely. We practically used their systems of mottled colors for varied conditions. But the system of shadow casting was entirely our own.

"There was considerable difference in the systems of keeping up the camouflage work also. The English maintained 'dumps' all along their sectors and issued a catalogue of the various kinds of camouflage in store. When request for a certain kind was made a pamphlet of printed directions was sent up with the material of any point on the front. It was then up to the gunners themselves to put the camouflage in place.

"The French also maintained 'dumps' and their camouflage section would give word-of-mouth advice together with a lot of artistic terms as to the manner of placing it. They were strong on watching the color schemes. The artillerymen had to put up their own camouflage, however.

"The Americans on the other hand aimed to have men aways on the front. These men would issue from the 'dumps' and wherever possible herd a gang of trained workers with each division to attend to supervision of concealing a battery. Inspections were made daily to see that discipline was carried out. The camouflage section always had the last word In the matter. If it was negative to movements on dangerous grounds its word was followed. It it was agreeable then the rest of the authorities could thresh it out.

"The older officers, especially those who had served with the British and French troops before coming into the United States army, recognized the worth of camouflage without question and strictIy enforced the orders of the deception division. Just to give an idea, here's a case in point.

"In a position near Bois Chanot, in the vicinity of Beaumont, there was a light fall of snow one morning. The camouflage section immediately requested no movements in order to keep from making tracks to battery position. Orders were issued by the commanding officer of the battery to shoot anyone attempting to get off the paths wired out by the camouflage section.

"General Summeral of the 1st Division was a great crank on camouflage. He learned by bitter experience. He thought it 'all bunk' at first, but later issued orders that no camouflage be attempted without advice and direction of the camouflage section.

"One of the favorite tricks at the front was to use a position a great deal for a few nights and then move out, at the same time keeping up appearances of activity. A fire at times to make a lot of smoke. This would draw the fire and detract the enemy attention from a new position a few hundred yards to the right or left of the old.

"On the other hand some of the artillery officers seemed to think that anything sent out by the camouflage section was endowed with magic powers of concealment. Without any reference as to its fitness in the natural scheme they would drape the material over the ammunition guns in such a manner that if anything it made the position more conspicuous. And they would be well satisfied with the job until a camouflage section man came along to rave and tear his hair and straighten the thing out.

"The camouflage section was composed of artists, sculptors, house painters, marble workers, tile layers, bricklayers, builders, carpenters and if I remember right we even had a former parson one section. They were all trained at the school conducted back of the lines before, they went to the front to work. Some of them proved grand little camoufleurs, too.
"One stunt that was started by our section and taken up with avidity was that of laying temporary camouflage for guns on the march when making a short halt. The first thing gunners were ordered to do at a halt was to cut branches and arrange them over the field pieces. This saved many a gun from a sad fate. The gunners could always find room beneath the canopy of branches in times of stress."

Twigg Smith brought back with him from France a big collection of photographs of camouflage work, some of which are published today for the first time. These are unique pictures in that they show actual work done by the camoufleurs to protect guns, screen roads and conceal movement of either guns or troops.

•••

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

was Cleopatra's Barge first case of ship camouflage

Above Cover of Paul F. Johnston, Shipwrecked in Paradise: Cleopatra's Barge in Hawai’i. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2015.  

Cleopatra’s Barge was the name of a lavish Egyptian-themed popular lounge (now permanently closed) at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. 

But long in advance of that, it was also the name of an oceangoing yacht, a “pleasure yacht,” built in Massachusetts in 1816 for George Crowninshield Jr. Six years later, it was sold to the King of Hawaii, Kamehameha II. A detailed account can be found online. It was known for its extravagant furnishings, indoor plumbing, and other features, including (as shown above in the cover of a book about it) surface patterns that (some have said) might have functioned like the confusing zigzag patterns applied to World War I ships for camouflage (called dazzle painting). Colorful horizontal stripes were painted on the starboard side, with a herringbone pattern on the port side (as shown in the painting). 

An article discussing this—Ernest S. Dodge, “Cleopatra’s Barge: America’s First Deep-Water Yacht”—was published in Motor Boating, December 1954, of which the following is excerpted (p. 104)—

In the early nineteenth century ships were brightly painted. Monotonous black topsides and painted ports were not yet generally fashionable. But Cleopatra’s Barge exceeded her contemporaries in the gaiety of her paint job as in most other things. Her starboard side, decorated with many horizontal stripes, in a variety of colors, was the more conventional. But to port she reflected her owner’s fancy and unorthodox taste with an unusual herringbone design. When seen from opposite sides she resembled two different vessels—the first case of ship camouflage on record. It is doubtful, however, if the camouflage was deliberate as has been claimed by those who believe that George [Crowninshield Jr] actually built the yacht to attempt a rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena. Rather was it one more example of his taste for the startling and unusual. 

Anon, portrait drawing of Kamehameha II

RELATED VIDEO SERIES

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

Camouflage Artist | John Dwight Bridge

Portrait of a Lady in a Red Dress by J. Dwight Bridge (n.d.)

J(ohn) Dwight Bridge was born on December 9, 1893, in St. Louis MO, where his family was socially prominent, wealthy and influential. His ancestors had been among the founders of Washington University. Having moved from Walpole MA to St. Louis, his family “made a fortune” from the railroad and the manufacture of cast-iron stoves.

Dwight attended a prestigious private school in Pawling NY. He then went on to study art at the Art Students League in New York, where he worked with painter, muralist and interior designer Albert Herter, whose father had co-founded the Herter Brothers interior design firm in New York, and whose son was Christian Herter, Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration.

In 1917, having returned to St. Louis, Bridge announced his intention to “give up his career in art to enter the Episcopal ministry.” But when the US entered World War I, he decided instead to enlist as a camouflage artist. In September 1918, when the US Army formed its first camouflage unit, he was among the first to enlist, along with fellow artists Barry Faulkner (Abbott H. Thayer’s cousin), Sherry E. Fry, William Twigg-Smith from Hawaii, and Everit Herter (son of Albert Herter), who had only recently married.

Appointed Sergeant Major (and soon after First Lieutenant), Bridge was the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer of the group. He shared a tent with the unit’s leading commissioned officer, Lieutenant Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the celebrated American sculptor. After months of training at Camp American University in Washington DC, the camouflage unit (officially known as Company A of the 40th Engineers) departed for France at the end of December 1918. In the subsequent months at the front, two members of the unit died in action, including Everit Herter, who was killed at Chateau-Thierry. Following the war, Bridge lived in Paris, then resettled in New York.

In 1918, five weeks before her husband's death, Everit Herter's wife had given birth to a son named Everit Herter Jr., who never saw his father. Around 1920, Dwight Bridge relocated to Santa Barbara CA, where his former teacher Albert Herter had established a new permanent studio at his mother’s former estate, called El Mirasol. Bridge married Everit Herter’s widow, Caroline Keck Herter, and thus became the stepfather of Everit Herter Jr. In July 1919, the Herters’ second son, named Albert, died in Santa Barbara at the age of two years and ten months. In their early years of marriage, Dwight Bridge and Caroline Herter Bridge became parents of two of their own sons, Matthew and John Jr.

J. Dwight Bridge (c1933)

In the 1920s, Bridge’s marriage fell apart. After several years of estrangement, he and his wife obtained a divorce in 1933. At about the same time, Bridge’s father died in St Louis, and he was slated to receive an inheritance of about $100,000 (worth nearly two million dollars today). In newspaper interviews, he revealed that he would refuse to accept it, saying that “an inheritance is more of a hindrance than a help.” Instead, he gave the money to his former wife and their children, and announced that henceforth he would survive as what he called a “vagabond” or “hobo”  artist.

He decided to hitchhike somewhat aimlessly around the country (his travels would take him as far as Japan and China) all the time earning his living by painting portraits. Carrying few possessions and almost no money, he began his trek in Salina KS, “the geological center of the United States.” According to a 1933 newspaper story (of which there were many, since his story was rightly regarded as odd, even bizarre), having arrived at Salina at 9:30 in the evening, he “laid all his money—30 cents—and his half-filled package of cigarettes down on the station platform, buried his wedding ring and, although it was night, immediately began a search for employment. He was 40 years old.” He was allowed to sleep in jail that night, and, in the morning, began to hitchhike west, earning his meals and lodging by various means. He was, he explained to reporters, “a man from the East, without any funds, a painter who could whitewash fences and paint doors, portraits or murals.”

The news stories bore fruit. After trading pencil portraits of meals, he was soon receiving commissions for portrait painting. The first was for $200, but he gradually raised the price to $500. On his trip to Japan, where he had eight commissions, he stopped over in Hawaii to see his former fellow camoufleur, William Twigg-Smith, whose relatives owned the newspaper there. From Hawaii, he flew back to the US mainland, then resettled in New York, while also continuing to travel around, from city to city, painting portraits of the rich in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Dayton OH, San Francisco, Palm Beach, Colorado Springs, and elsewhere.

In a 1946 article in the Palm Beach Post, there is a pencil portrait of US Navy Captain Martin L. Marquette, who was then the commanding officer of the Naval Special Hospital (about to be closed) in Palm Beach. The drawing, the article explains, “is the work of J. Dwight Bridge, portrait artist and veteran of both World War I and II, to whom the closing of the hospital will signal a return to civilian life. During the past few months, while recuperating at the hospital, Mr. Bridge as part of his rehabilitation work has got his hand back in sketching by doing 90 portraits of the staff and patients at the hospital...During the war [WWII] he engaged in camouflage work in the AAF [Army Air Force] along similar lines he followed for the engineers in the previous war.”

Three years earlier, one of the Bridges’ sons, John Dwight Bridge Jr, (born 1920), had been killed in action while serving with the US Navy in the Mediterranean.

John Dwight Bridge Sr. died in Palm Beach FL on October 22, 1974.

•••

Sources

Evelyn Burke, “‘Hobo Artist’ Paints Society Folk But He Doesn’t Like Money” in Pittsburgh Press, May 2, 1935.

“Capt. M.L. Marquette” in Palm Beach Post (Palm Beach FL), February 3, 1946.

Helen Clanton, “Hitch-Hiking as a Form of Service” in St. Louis Globe Democrat, January 13, 1936.

“Noted Artist Says Fighting Elements Provides More Thrills Than Many Sports” in Dayton Daily News (Dayton OH), April 15, 1936.

“St. Louisan in Camouflage Unit of US Army Home” In St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 15, 1919, p. 5.

“St. Louisan Who Paid Way Around World as Painter and Portrait He Made” in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 19, 1933.

•••

SEE ALSO

Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)

Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)

Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)

Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk)

William Twigg-Smith | Camouflage Artist

William Twigg-Smith, Hilo Sampans (1917), oil on canvas

On Wikipedia, there is a brief biography (which admittedly I contributed to) of a New Zealand-born American artist named William Twigg-Smith (1883-1950), a painter, illustrator and musician (primarily a flutist), who lived most of his adult life in Hawaii. During World War I, in 1917 he paid his own expenses to travel from Honolulu to Washington DC to join the American Camouflage Corps on the grounds of Camp American University. According to a news article (Riley H. Allen, "Camoufleur Twigg Smith Is Wearing Corporal's Stripes" in Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 20, 1917, p. 8), he "was about the first man on the ground, and he carries No. 1 card showing him to be the first member of Company F, 25th United States Engineers, Camouflage, the official name of the unit." Soon after, he was joined in that unit by Iowa sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry, Everit Herter (brother of statesman Christian Herter), and New Hampshire muralist Barry Faulkner (cousin of Abbott H. Thayer, frequently referred to as the "father of camouflage"). In Faulkner's autobiography (Sketches From an Artist's Life), he recalls that when he, along with Fry and Herter, first arrived at their tent, "we found a minstrel [Twigg-Smith] easing his solitude by playing Hawaiian airs on a ukelele. He came from the islands and was pleasant and companionable."

I recently found a photograph of Twigg-Smith (reproduced below) that appeared initially in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Saturday, February 17, 1917) in connection with his collaboration with two other artists on three Pan-Pacific Carnival dioramas that year. Five months later, he would leave to join the army. To enable Twigg-Smith to travel to Washington DC, a large exhibit of his work was mounted in the Pan-Pacific building, with proceeds from the sales to go to covering his enlistment costs.

left to right: Joseph Whittle, Lionel Walden, D. Howard Hitchcock, and William Twigg-Smith

Twigg-Smith was born in Nelson, New Zealand. At age 16, he moved to the US, living first in San Francisco, where he studied painting with Evelyn Almond Withrow, and then in Chicago, where he worked with Harry M. Walcott at the Art Institute. A naturalized US citizen, in 1916 he settled in Hawaii, where he was a flutist for the Honolulu Symphony, and where, by his marriage to Margaret Carter Thurston, he became related to the American entrepreneurs (descended from the original missionaries) who had engineered the overthrow of the Hawaiian royalty. He was the father of Thurston Twigg-Smith.

Prior to his camouflage service, Twigg-Smith was known for on-site paintings of active Hawaiian volcanoes. In a news article (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, December 9, 1916, p. 8), he is said to have exhibited "a sequence of volcano paintings—an attempt to catch Madame Pele in a systematic series of her changeful moods." A later article (December 26, p. 4) reports that the "crater Mauna Loa is smoking…[and Twigg-] Smith is anxious to get to the Big Island and paint the crater in action."

In February 1919, having returned from France but still in Washington, Twigg-Smith was among a dozen artists who were listed as having contributed "posters and decorations" for a philanthropic fundraising event. In a news account of that (Washington Times, February 9, 1919, p. 11) it was stated that "Men of the camouflage corps are seen on the streets of Washington wearing funny looking yellow lizards on the left shoulder. The lizard is really a chameleon, a 'critter' which changes color according to the background on which it is placed. The insignia therefore is significant of their work." Below is a photograph of Twigg-Smith's fellow camoufleur, Barry Faulkner, in a uniform bearing his yellow camoufleur's shoulder patch.

American muralist Barry Faulkner (c1918), wearing camoufleur's patch

In that same article, the names of those in the Camouflage Corps (no doubt some of them misspelled) are listed as follows: "Leslie Thrasher, H. K[err] Eby, A. Bloudheim, H[enry] R. Sutter, A. Rottnere [probably Abraham Rattner], G[eorge] B[radford] Ashworth, Fred[eric] S[eymour] [called Feg] Murray, Robert Laswent, Joseph Cox, [Frederic] Earl Christie [Christy], Frank [Francis William] Swain, Don Methvin, Walter Tubesing, Howard [Ashman] Patterson and [William]Twigg Smith."