H. Ledyard Towle / artist, camouflage instructor / hero

The Army officer encircled in yellow above is Captain H. Ledyard Towle. He is conducting an outdoor instructional session during World War I, for the purpose of teaching camouflage to members of the American Womens Reserve Camouflage Corps. In earlier postings, we may have blogged about Towle more often than nearly anyone else. 

Not only did he work with this unusual women’s organization, he also became prominent as a “color engineer” in the years following the war. 

He had a significant influence on the postwar popularity of brightly colored automobiles, the colors used in American homes (inside and out), and the choice of colors used (for increased worker safety) in factory interiors. We’ve talked about his activities not only in various blogposts but also in an online video called Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage.

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Here now are two more recent finds about Towle’s doubly “colorful life”:

GLEANINGS FROM THE WORLD’S PRESS. What Colors Can Do. Queenslander (Brisbane, Queensland). August 8, 1929, p. 63—

“Who did this?” roared the president of a New York bank when he discovered an impish cartoon of himself on the back of an envelope. The guilty 13-year-old mail clerk jumped guiltily, but stood his ground, “I did, sir.” He held out shaking fingers, for he needed his three dollars a week. “I’ll rub it off for you, sir.”

“You will not!” snapped the president. He put the cartoon in his pocket, and his eyes twinkled at the young culprit. “If you can draw as well as that you’d better study art. Go to school nights if you have to, but leave my stationery alone, young man!”

In this unconventional way began the artistic career of Capt. H. Ledyard Towle, chief color expert for the General Motors Corporation and a pioneer in the modern movement to put beauty and color into the American home. If you have a lavender ice box, or a “sunlit” alarm clock, or a flame-colored sports car, the chances are he is responsible (writes Grace M. Fletcher, in “The World’s Work”).

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Carnegie Hero Fund Commission (online post). Harold Ledyard Towle, Merry Point VA. Act Details: July 5, 1951. Type of Act: Drowning—

Harold Ledyard Towle saved SheIva Jean Lankford from drowning, Merry Point, Virginia, July 5, 1951. While riding on an inflated tire-tube in the Carrotoman River, Shelve, 9, who could not swim, was swept into deep water by a strong wind and drifted 300 feet from the bank. Although warned by a physician to avoid exertion, Towle, 51, color engineer, ran 250 feet to the bank and entered the water. He waded 50 feet and with great effort swam 325 feet through waves two feet high to overtake Shelva. In a badly winded and weakened condition he took hold of Shelva and supported her. A man rowed a boat to them, and he and Towle aided Shelva from the water. Towle lacked strength to climb into the boat and grasped the gunwale. The man rowed towing Towle to wadable water, and all reached the bank. Shelva was extremely nervous, and she and Towle sustained numerous welts from stinging nettles. Both recovered.

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

Thelma Cudlipp's satirical view of camouflage corps

American Women's Camouflage Corps (1918)

Above One of various US government photographs from World War I of the American Women’s Camouflage Corps. A few years ago, we curated and designed a public exhibition of this and other photographs from the same unit. All items from that exhibit can now be accessed online.

Below are the sketches and humorous captions by Thelma Cudlipp for a satirical treatment of the same subject from a 1918 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. The artist/author was the American illustrator Thelma Somerville Cudlipp (1891-1983), who, through marriages and family links, is also sometimes known as Thelma Somerville Grosvenor Cudlipp Whitman. Having led an undoubtedly interesting life, she merits looking into.

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Thelma Cudlipp (sketches and text), "Camouflage! Oh, Where Have We Heard That Word Before?", from Vanity Fair, September 1918, p. 35—

ISN'T IT WONDERFUL how the very most fashionable women in America are helping to dethrone that whole darn Hohenzollern family? And isn’t it wonderful, too, to note the variety of activities in which their energies are beginning to count for the Allies? Take, for instance, the Women’s Camouflage Corps, of New York, which is doing such wonderful work up in the Bronx! Why, it really isn' t possible—because of the work of the corps there—to walk in the northern confines of our city without acknowledging the truth of the saying that "Things are not what they seem." It was obvious, from the beginning of the war, that the ladies would flock to the art of camouflage, as if drawn to it by some natural inherited instinct. For, is a woman—we ask you—ever as happy as when she is persuading us that when she offers us one thing, it is, in reality, another? And so, when the vogue of camouflage came along and gave the girls an opportunity to resort to their favorite occupation of dissembling, why, that's all there was to it. The incidents mirrored on this page are the results of recent and actual experiences on the part of Vanity Fair.

Here is a rather saddening incident. Private Phylisse Stuyvesant has, for a week or more, been annoying her sister members of the Camouflage Corps in a great variety of ways. All of the girls have been doing their best to “sit on her”—but so far, without success. Here, however. we see the snub actually accomplished—not by the girls, to be sure, but by a vagrant cook, who, with a strolling laundress, is out for a little alfresco picnic.

Horrid predicament of Lieutenant Corinne de Puyster, who is acting as guide and cicerone for a French General of note, who has graciously consented to visit the Ladies Camouflage Camp. Lieutenant de Puyster, determining, inwardly, to give Sergeant Esme Vanderbilt at least ten days in the guard-house for having camouflaged her Sherry's lunch basket so as to make it appear to be but an innocent and inoffensive bit of the parade ground.

And here is a really tragical incident, as a result of which Vanity Fair almost went without its accustomed liquid refreshment on its recent visit to the ladies' camp. The girls had camouflaged a case of Bevo [near beer] to look like a cross-section of a rocky pasture, with the distressing result that it took three privates in the ladies' corps upwards of twenty minutes to find the precious fluid. The discovery of it was only accomplished by implicit obedience of the terse orders: “Ladies! Forward on all fours.”

So many people are saying that Vanity Fair is an improper magazine—what with its troupes of barefoot dancers and its portraits of the girls in the Follies—that we hesitated a good deal before printing this rather questionable illustration, displaying, as it does, two gentlemen about to take a swim in the river Bronx, all unaware of the fact that Captain Gladys Astor is lurking, not more than five paces away, cleverly disguised as a stunted nut tree.

And this is what led to the very biggest scandal of all, a tragedy so tremendous that it led to the withdrawal of Major Muriel Van Rensselaer from the Camouflage Corps. The Major, disguised as a sassafras bush, was, all unwillingly, forced to overhear a lengthy, candid and snappy account of herself and all her activities—just exactly what all the girls really thought of her—from two horrid privates in her own company.

Women camoufleurs Louise Larned and Rose Stokes

 Above Government photograph of an unidentified US Navy Yeoman (F) (or Yeomanette), c1918. Assigned to the Camouflage Section in Washington DC, she is assembling wooden ship models, which were later painted with camouflage schemes, and tested for effectiveness.

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Louise Larned (1890-1972), whose married name was Louise Larned Fasick (she married John E. Fasick in 1929), is sometimes confused with her mother, Louise Alexander Larned (1862-1949). Her father was US Army Colonel Charles William Larned (1850-1911), who briefly served with General George A. Custer in the Seventh Cavalry, but is more commonly known for having taught drawing at West Point Military Academy for 35 years.

Both parents were descended from a long line of military officers, and Louise grew up in the vicinity of West Point. She followed her father’s aptitude for drawing, as well as her family's tradition of serving in the military.

At the beginning of World War I, American women were not allowed to officially serve in the military, but they could provide supporting roles as civilians. In an article in the New York Tribune, Anne Furman Goldsmith, the New York chairman of “a proposed camouflage unit of women for service in the United States,” called for women to enroll in the organization. It was planned that they would be trained at a four- to six-week camp by a camouflage expert, and then sail off to duty in France. “There is no age limit for the volunteers,” the article stated, but “they must be physically strong and active, however, and have some knowledge of landscape, mural or scene painting.”

The acceptance of Goldsmith’s proposal was repeatedly delayed (according to the War Department, “it could not spare an instructor”) until the unit was finally established in 1918, with the official title of the Camouflage Corps of the National League for Women’s Service in New York. Louise Larned volunteered in May of 1918 and joined a group that was taught by artist H. Ledyard Towle. Joining at the same time was another woman artist, with strong connections to West Point, Rose Stokes.

After attending the camouflage camp, the women camoufleurs (who were sardonically nicknamed “camoufleuses” or “camoufloosies”) took on other projects, most of which used “dazzle” camouflage to attract larger crowds to recruiting and fund-raising events. Overnight, on July 11, 1918, for example, twenty-four of the women camouflage artists painted a multi-colored disruption scheme (using abstract, geometric shapes in black, white, pink, green, and blue) on the USS Recruit, a wooden recruiting station in Union Square in NYC, built to convincingly look like a ship. Louise Larned and Rose Stokes were members of that painting team.

In September 1918, both Larned and Stokes were assigned to the Navy’s Camouflage Section, where they probably made model ships (to which camouflage was applied for testing) or, as draftsmen, prepared large scale colored diagrams for use by artists at the docks in painting camouflage on the ships.

They had expected to remain on duty until the war’s official end. But the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, and exactly one month later, newspapers announced that most of the eleven thousand women “yeomanettes” would be discharged early. But certain women were retained, with Larned and Stokes among them. More details were provided by the Pittsburgh Post:

“Among those who will remain are the artist girls who drew dazzle designs for merchant and battleships—those funny zig-zag stripes which made the Germans waste torpedoes and valuable shells on ships which appeared to be ‘going the wrong way.’ The artists today were working on submarine plans and they like the life.

“‘I do wish the newspapers would say we don’t want to leave the navy,’ said Louise Larned, one of the artistic yeomanettes. ‘We want to be part of the service.’

“And Rose Stokes, whose brothers are all West Pointers, wants to ‘be in the navy—not just a barnacle attached to it by civil service rules.’”

Two months later, a woman journalist named Edith Moriarty published an article in the Spokane Chronicle in which she said that, during the war, the government had discovered that women are just as good or better than men at drawing-related tasks, such as drafting charts and diagrams.

She continued: “Two young women who made good along that line are Miss Rose Stokes of New York and Miss Louise Larned, of West Point NY. These girls, who are both artists, enlisted in the navy as yeomen and they were in New York in the camouflage corps studying to go abroad when the armistice was signed. They have spent most of their time while in the service putting in details on specifications and charts for submarines. The girls are so satisfactory at their work that they have been retained by the navy although many of the yeomen have been relieved of further duty.”

It has so far proved a challenge to locate more specific facts about the life of Louise Larned Fasick. One additional finding is that she was the designer of what was known as the “Navy Girl Poster,” which was presumably used to recruit women to serve in the navy.

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Update (August 29, 2019) Sorry, haven't yet located an image file for Louise Larned's poster (there are well-known posters by that tag but they appear to have been the work of Howard Chandler Christy). However, we have located three paintings by Louise Larned and one by Rose Stokes. Of the four, three are government paintings of ships (two by Larned, one by Stokes), in public domain, and the fourth is a pastel cover painting for St. Nicholas Magazine (by Larned), dated 1929. They are reproduced below.

Above Louise Larned, Ocean-Going Tug Towing Target Shed (n.d.)

Above Louise Larned, Ship of the Nevada Class (n.d.)

Above Rose Stokes, South Dakota Class Battleship, Concept Drawing (n.d.) [at a cursory glance from a distance, it looks almost identical to the previous Larned painting]

Above Louise Larned, Cover painting for the September 1929 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine.

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Sources
Women Artists Asked For Camouflage Unit: Miss Anne F. Goldsmith Wants One Hundred To Train for Service in France. New York Tribune, October 24, 1917.

Camouflage the Recruit: Woman’s Service Corps Redecorate the Landship in Union Square. Washington Post, May 14, 1918.

Yeomen Rejoice; End of Jobs’ Scorn Is Sighted as Yeomanettes Leave Navy; Girls Establish Good Record. Pittsburgh Daily Post (Pittsburgh PA), July 28, 1919.

Edith Moriarty, With the Women of Today. Spokane Chronicle (Spokane WA), September 18, 1919.

Roy R. Behrens, ed., Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books, 2012.

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Earlier, I had posted a newspaper photograph of Louise Larned and Rose Stokes (NY Tribune, August 7, 1919) at work drafting plans for submarines. But the picture quality was so poor that I decided to remove it. Nevertheless, the caption for the photograph may still be of interest. It reads: These girls drew submarine plans for the US Navy instead of knitting socks during the war. They enlisted in the navy as yeomen and were in the camouflage corps in New York studying to go abroad when the armistice was signed. Both girls are artists and will be retained by the navy after yeomanettes are relieved. Miss Rose Stokes of New York City is commander of the Betsy Ross Chapter of the American Legion…

Note A somewhat different version of this post has also been provided to AskART.com.

Still More on H. Ledyard Towle | A Hue Guru

Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps (1918

H(arold) Ledyard Towle was an American artist and industrial colorist, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1890. After studying art at Pratt Institute, and at the Art Students League (under Frank Vincent DuMond and William Merritt Chase), he embarked on what he thought would be a career as a painter of portraits and landscapes. However, as he later admitted, his experiences as a camouflage artist during World War I changed many of his attitudes, including how he looked at art.

During WWI, Towle was a camouflage instructor in the 71st Infantry Regiment of the New York State National Guard. In that capacity, he provided camouflage training for troops who were preparing to fight on the battlefields in Europe. He also taught a course about camouflage at the Columbia University Teachers College. Before the war ended, he himself shipped off to France as a machine-gunner and camoufleur at the Front.

While still in New York, he also took on an unusual task, which led to a flood of news articles. In early 1918, approval was made to establish a Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps, and Towle was designated as the instructor for a unit of about thirty-five to fifty civilian women volunteers. The training was largely conducted out of doors in New York, on the grounds of the Billings Estate, which is now the museum The Cloisters.

Full-page article on Towle's women camoufleurs (July 1918)

Towle’s course for women was not only about camouflage, since it also offered training in military drill, boxing, and pistol and rifle marksmanship. Because (or so it was commonly said at the time) women were naturally inclined toward sewing, one of their primary challenges was to make hooded camouflaged “observation suits,” with which they could blend in with natural settings. There was no shortage of news stories about the unit’s activities (enlivened by photographs, along with appropriate quotes from Lieutenant Towle). In July 1918, there were widely published stories about these women camoufleurs (jokingly referred to then as “camoufleuses”) because they had applied a camouflage scheme to a scaled-down wooden battleship (called the USS Recruit) in the middle of New York City in Union Square. In fact, it was not a genuine ship, but a landlocked replica built in 1917 for use as a novelty recruiting station. It was someone’s suggestion that it would be even more novel, generate more publicity, and encourage more recruits to join if its surface was totally covered in brightly-colored, abstract shapes (in “dazzle camouflage”). The women camoufleurs in Towle’s course were chosen to accomplish this. They did the whole thing overnight—and it was the talk of the town the next morning.

When Captain Towle returned from the war, surely he was discouraged to find (like others of his generation) that American Impressionism was no longer in vogue, having been swept aside by Modernism that had begun with the Armory Show in 1913. Beginning in 1919, he worked for the US Treasury Department in Washington DC, in connection with the Victory Liberty Loan Committee, then moved on to positions at several advertising agencies, including one at which he was in charge of the DuPont Company account.

A breakthrough in his career took place in 1925, when he was hired by DuPont (working in cooperation with General Motors in Detroit) to establish a Duco Color Advisory Service in New York. As documented in a book by Regina Lee Blaszczyk on the history of color use in industrial production (The Color Revolution), this enterprising artist-turned-camoufleur became phenomenally influential at DuPont, General Motors (where he worked with other former camoufleurs, and with Harvey J. Earl), and Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, as industry’s first and foremost “color engineer.”

Towle moved from New York to Detroit in July of 1928, when General Motors launched an “art and color section” and appointed Towle its “chief color expert.” He talked about his career transition in news articles at the time. “I went into the war,” he explained, “thinking art belonged to the chosen few. I came out knowing that it belonged to every urchin in the street. Working on wartime camouflage problems taught one how to use color with a purpose. I saw the futility of painting portraits to collect dust in museums, and turned to camouflaging industry and its products of everyday life.” His disdain for the art world is evident in his statement that “The automobile manufacturers and plumbing magnates are rivaling the Medici of old as patrons of art, and the resources of modern corporations are unlimited.”

In Blaszczyk’s book, she concludes that Towle was “America’s top automotive and paint colorist.” In the 1928 news article (cited earlier), he is described as "a pioneer in the movement which has brought lavender tea boxes, turquoise alarm clocks and a host of vivid motor cars…," a hue guru who “is now studying the 'color consciousness' of each section of the country, hoping to perfect hues which will satisfy the particular desires of each district."

In December 1934, Towle joined the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company as director of its Division of Creative Design and Color. In 1941, he was interviewed in a news article about his proposal to set up a Pittsburgh civilian camouflage committee, for the purpose of determining which facilities in that city were most vulnerable to attacks by enemy aircraft, and “to design methods either to hide these places by breaking up their shadows or by making them harder to hit.”

From 1945 through 1950, Towle was a lecturer in Business Administration at the College of William and Mary. He died on November 8, 1973. His papers are housed in the Manuscript and Archives Department at the Haley Museum and Library in Wilmington DE.

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Sources

Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2002.

_________, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009.

_________ ed., Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2012.

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012.

“Color Engineer Sees New Epoch of Vivid Utility” in Waterloo (Iowa) Courier, April 10, 1929, p. 14.

“Raid Defense Gets Impetus in Pittsburgh” in Sandusky (Ohio) Register and News. September 16, 1941.

H. Ledyard Towle, “What the American ‘Camouflage’ Signifies” in New York Times. June 3, 1917, p. 14.

_________, “Projecting the Automobile into the Future” in Society for Automotive Engineering Journal, July 29, 1931.

_________, “Here It Comes” in American Magazine, September 1932.

“Ledyard Towle” (obituary), in New York Times, November 11, 1973, p. 73.

The Color Revolution and Camouflage

Ad in Ladies Home Journal, October 1929

The Color Revolution
by Regina Lee Blaszczyk
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012
368 pp., illus. 121 col. Trade: $34.95
ISBN: 9780262017770.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

THE PHRASE in this book’s title initially appeared in print in a 1929 issue of Fortune magazine, a few months after the huge financial crash that launched the Great Depression. It announced that there was an ongoing “color revolution,” a widespread adoption of color in industrial products, resulting in “apricot autos, blue beds, and mauve mops.”

Ironically, this book also documents that, in another sense, this was not so much a “revolution” as an “evolution,” the stirrings of which can be traced to the early nineteenth century. It was massively encouraged by the Industrial Revolution, in the interior uses of color at the Crystal Palace Exhibition (the first World’s Fair in 1851), the invention of synthetic dyes, and chromolithographic prints and packaging.

It was also about “evolution” because in part it was empowered by the theories of Charles Darwin, whose much-debated writings about natural selection prompted an increase of interest in the survival function of colors and patterns in natural forms. Was conspicuous coloration a means by which to find a mate? At the same time, did subdued coloration contribute to concealment? One consequence of this exchange was the rise of modern theories about ”protective coloration” in nature, which in World War I acquired the name of “camouflage.” In turn, this led to chatter about “warning coloration,” such as zoologist Hugh B. Cott’s remark that the traffic commission “has adopted a system of coloration whose copyright belongs by priority to wasps and salamanders.”

A recurring theme throughout this book—which the author plays up from beginning to end—is that modern applications of color have developed hand in hand with advances in camouflage. Indeed, it is even contended that, at the end of WWI, it was former camouflage experts (both army and navy) who “applied their knowledge of visual deception to product design and created a new profession: the corporate colorist.” If a person has the wherewithal to conceal an object, he or she can also make that same object conspicuous, through reverse engineering. As this book points out repeatedly, the uses of color in product design were based on the inversion of camouflage techniques—in the words of American artist (and WWI camoufleur) H. Ledyard Towle, it was “reverse camouflage.” More>>>

More on Camoufleur H. Ledyard Towle

In earlier writings, we've documented the contributions of American women to camouflage, in connection with their service in the Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps during World War I. In the photo above, published in the Evening Public Ledger Philadelphia (May 13, 1918), four women camoufleurs are demonstrating their camouflaged "observer's suits." These had been constructed as part of a camouflage course, taught by a New York portrait painter, named H. Ledyard Towle, whom we wrote about recently with regard to his prominent later career as an industrial color consultant for DuPont, General Motors and Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Below is most likely a news publicity photograph of Towle at the time he was teaching this camouflage course.

More recently, we ran across an Associated Press news article in the Waterloo Courier (IA) (Wednesday, April 10, 1929, p. 14), which reproduces a photo of Towle, and describes him as a "chief color expert for the General Motors corporation" and "a pioneer in the movement which has brought lavender tea boxes, turquoise alarm clocks and a host of vivid motor cars."

Towle is briefly quoted about his experiences as an army camoufleur and camouflage instructor. "I went into the war thinking that art belonged to the chosen few," he recalls, but "I came out knowing that beauty belonged to every urchin in the street. Working on war-time camouflage problems taught me how to use color with a purpose. I saw the futility of painting portraits to collect dust in museums, and turned to camouflaging industry and its products of everyday life."

In June 1928, according to this news account, General Motors established an "art and color section," and Towle was appointed its "chief color expert." The article concludes: "He is now studying the 'color consciousness' of each section of the country, hoping to perfect hues which will satisfy the particular desires of each district." As we observed in an earlier post, the story of Towle's contributions (and other camoufleurs as well) to the uses of color in commerce has recently been published in Regina Lee Blaszczyk's The Color Revolution (2012).