American Impressionism / Provincetown Camouflage

Below Photograph (c1919) of American artist George Elmer Browne (1871-1946), a Massachusetts-based painter who studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at the Academie Julian in Paris. He was associated with American Impressionists, such as Edmund Tarbell, Frank W. Benson, and Joseph DeCamp. Reproduced above is one of his finest impressionist paintings (Harbor Scene with Fishing Boats, 1910, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Born in Gloucester MA, around 1918 he acquired 162 Commercial Street in Provincetown, which served as his studio and the West End School of Art. Detailed information can be found online here and here.

In the following news article, it is claimed that Browne had been involved in “camouflage work” for the US Government during World War I, presumably as a civilian, and most likely in connection with ship camouflage.

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CAMOUFLAGE FOR UGLY STANDPIPE TO CHANGE IT TO A THING OF BEAUTY Noted Provincetown Artist Evolves Own Ingenious Plan For Eliminating Unpleasantness From Landscape, in Boston Globe, November 4, 1931—

PROVINCETOWN, Nov 3—Fastidious about its landscape since it has become an art center, Provincetown will have what is thought to be the first camouflaged standpipe in the United States.

Thanks to the initiative and ingenuity of George Elmer Browne, famous artist, the town's new standpipe, instead of being painted black like the old one, will receive a tricky blend of colors, which will render it almost invisible.

The sand dune on which the standpipe is built will melt into the base of the iron structure, as will the shrubery and foliage; then the color will blend upwards into sky tones and cloud tones, so that instead of an eyesore crowning the landscape, a very necessary object will be so painted that it will appear as a thing of beauty.

According to artist Browne, the standpipe will be invisible except when it stands out against the sun, and even then it will not be a very bold silhouette.

At the present time, two standpipes occupy the hill, but the old one, long an eyesore, marring the view of the town from the harbor and detracting from the grandeur of tie towering Pilgrim Monument on Town Hill, will soon come down.

Mr Browne’s studio commands an unobstructed view of the hill of the standpipes. When the new and larger one went up, he began to study the problem of avoiding the uglification.

Having done camouflage work for the Government during the war, he devised his color scheme and presented it to the Town Water Commissioners, with designs worked out in oil.

The artist, at their request, then presented the Commissioners with a scale model of the pipe, from which areas to be colored could be figured.

In coloring the big standpipe. the painters will work from a small sheet iron model. The model is now in the hands of the contractors.

too old for draft Jean-Louis Forain serves nevertheless

Above Jean-Louis Forain, wartime sketch of a soldier writing a letter home, reproduced in the same news article quoted below. Forain's service as a camoufleur is also featured in this short video.

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Albert Franz Cochrane, …FORAIN… in the Boston Evening Transcript, August 15, 1931, Part 4, Page 3—

[During World War I, the famous French satririst and illustrator Jean-Louis] Forain not only helped keep up the spirits of his compatriots and their allies and influence the attitude of the neutrals by his terrible caricatures in Le Figaro, L’Opinion and L’Avenir, which, like those of the Hollander [Louis] Raemekers, were reproduced all over the world, but he actually entered the [French] Army, despite his sixty-two years, and rendered yeoman service there in the [Section de Camouflage] as right hand man of the camouflage chief, the painter Guirand de Scevola. 

When Forain presented himself booted, strapped and helmeted before [French officer Philippe] Pétain, the future Commander-in-chief, who is blessed with a quiet sense of humor, finding him [Forain], no doubt, a trifle “chesty” for an ex-civilian, [exclaimed] playfully, “Que dirait Forain s’il vous voyait!” (“What would Forain say if he could see you!”)

Below A younger Forain with his wife, Jeanne Bosc in a gondola in Venice. 

Seven to seventy | Edward Simmons looking back

Edward Simmons, Girl Reading (1893)

Edward Simmons, From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee. New York: Harpers, 1922, p. 341—

…and then came the War. I was too old to go; they even refused me in the Camouflage section, although I insist I would have been of use.

Although I was not allowed to take part in the War, my whole world changed. The color of everything—we were enmeshed in khaki. To eyes accustomed to riotous shades, this deadening of the whole tone of things was tremendously depressing… I wanted to keep step, and felt as if I were marching, marching, marching—until I would suddenly become conscious that I was only sitting still. I had never found the necessity of realizing the meaning of the old saying, “He also serves—“ For the first time I was forced to acknowledge that it was the age of the young.

Edward Simmons (date unknown)

Art | an illusion of reality that tells the truth by fibbing

Leon Dabo (1909)

Above Portrait photograph of Leon Dabo by Emil O. Hoppé (1909). Public domain.

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Rollin Lynde Hartt, CAMOUFLAGE in Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1918—

As their train nears Chicago, passengers note a low, murmurous hum. It is the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage.” Those of us who once confined our remarks to “Skiddoo! Twenty-three!” and more recently to “I should worry!” and “What do you know about that?” peg along at present on “Camouflage,” though a bit wearisome it grows. Declares a neighbor of mine, “The next time I hear ‘Camouflage’ I shall make my will, kiss my friends and relatives good-bye, and jump in the wastebasket!”…

[Camouflage] borrows its technique from a humble enough source. It is the Chamber of Horrors over again…Some steal their technique from the impressionists. Some repeat the antics of cubism. Others depend for their success upon certain very curious principles of optics. It takes an artist to invent them and an artist to explain them, and Mr. Leon Dabo* is never more entertaining than when holding forth on their theory and practice.

In order to understand the enormously important part impressionism plays in camouflage one must first define impressionism. Aesthetically, it is a simple matter, merely an attempt to reproduce, not nature itself, but the side of nature that appeals strongly to the artist. Technically, however, it involves profundities. Instead of counterfeiting reality, it creates an illusion of reality. It tells the truth by fibbing…

It was to cubism that the camouflageurs had recourse when they wanted to hide ships from view. Painting them gray was a poor device, they found. From habit, the eye would still recognize the silhouette of a ship even at a great distance. But it turns out that the eye had come to depend almost wholly on habit. Break up the familiar silhouette by dappling it with inharmonious colors in huge, shapeless masses, or—better yet—by covering it with immense cubist triangles and with cubist rectangles as immense—and the eye of the seasoned mariner would report no ship at all. The eye sees what it is accustomed to seeing and balks at learning new tricks.…

And why resent that low, murmurous hum of the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage”? Let the hum continue. It is just now a foolish hum, to be sure; it reflects a quaintly naive sense of novelty, as if camouflage were a new thing under the sun instead of being a modern recourse to trickery as old as “Quaker” cannon and the painted portholes on merchantmen, and, for that matter, the celebrated wooden horse at Troy. But it popularizes an idea. It gives it prominence. It backs up the army’s determination to put camouflage where it belongs. France has thousands of camouflageurs. So should we.…

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* Note The following entry was featured in a column titled Fifty Years Ago 1918, in the August 25, 1968 issue of the Asbury Park Press (Asbury NJ)—

Aug. 27—Leon Dabo, American painter who has been serving on General Pershing’s staff designing camouflage, was the principal speaker at a war rally in Ocean Grove Auditorium. He described enemy atrocities.