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| Roy R. Behrens © 2026 |
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 /
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
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| Gerald Handerson Thayer |
Over the years, I've written quite a lot about his collaborative work with his father, Abbott Handerson Thayer,
who is sometimes also known as "the father of camouflage." The father
blinds us to the son. Below are portions from a news article, reporting
on a public talk that Gerald presented in Rochester NY two years before
his father died. He is a great unknown. At some point he needs to be
written about.
•••
CAMOUFLAGE AND
PROTECTIVE COLORATION: Man Who Shares with Father Credit for Discovery,
Gives Interesting Lecture at Memorial Gallery in The Post Express (Rochester NY), March 17, 1919—
A lecture on “Camouflage and Protective Coloration” was delivered yesterday afternoon by Gerald H[anderson] Thayer at the Memorial Art Gallery. Dr. [Benjamin] Rush Rhees
introduced the speaker as “the illustrious son of an illustrious
father, to both of whom belongs the credit for the discovery of the
principles of camouflage and protective coloration.”
Excerpts from Thayer’s [slide illustrated] presentation are as follows—
Just how much of the camouflage used in the war is the result of the work of my father, Abbott [Handerson] Thayer,
and myself is not certain. We did not have any influence on the dazzle
system eventually used at sea, which was planned to deceive the man at
the periscope, so much as on the early marine system or the method
employed on land.
•••
Our book published before the war [Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom,
1909] was used in England, France and Germany. At first everything was
fantastically camouflaged, and not very effectively, but later the only
method used was to prop up on poles nets of cord or wire to which were
fastened bits of colored burlap. This was made in great quantities in
factories behind the lines, and at the front was used to cover guns,
earthworks, anything that was to be concealed from airplane cameras.
Sticks and dirt from the vincinity would then be thrown on top, and
whenever possible the result was tested by asking a friendly plane to
take a picture of it.
•••
Darwin’s father was the first to
notice that protective coloration was a wild animal trait. My father
and I found that there were certain well defined principles. The figure
of a pure white duck stands out conspiciously against a pure white
backgound. The shadows about the figure give it away. The same figure,
with a gray back but with a light underneath is invisible against a gray
background. The under parts must be lighter in color to offset the
shadow. That is the first principle, called “countershading.” It is very common in North America.
The second is “concealment.”
Strangely enough the gourgeous plumage of tropical birds is the best
example of this. They are hard to find in their brilliant surroundings.
The third principle is that of “disguise,”
when an animal pretends to be what it is not or not to be what it is.
The pattern of the coat is like the surroundings. A zebra, for instance,
is practically invisible standing against the sky in reeds or a clump
of bushes. The woodcock is another only it is like the ground on which
it builds its nest. Disguise is found all the way from butterflies to
skunks.
Many animals combine two of these principles in their coloration.
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
•••
CAMOUFLAGE AND HOW TO PRACTICE IT IN PRIVATE LIFE with sketches by Harry Raleigh, in Vanity Fair, 1917—
Camouflage is now the military and artistic rage. All the French and German painters and illustrators are going in for it, not only in the war zone but at home. The art of camouflage is also practiced in America. It consists in so painting objects that they will exactly duplicate the background against which they are to appear. The net result is that the objects so painted become invisible. Guns, bridges, forts, soldiers, helmets, have only to be cleverly colored, striped, streaked, or spotted, in order to vanish completely from view. Try it in your family; streak any member of it—your wife, let us say—like a zebra and see how quickly she will disappear from view when placed before a thicket, a pile of underbrush, an art nouveau screen, an Elsie de Wolfe sofa, or a Navajo blanket.
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
•••
Anon, HIRSUTE VEIL CAMOUFLAGE IS FLU GERM DUPE, in Salt Lake Herald Republican, December 15, 1918, p. 48—
Further hint to the flu dodger—masquerade behind nature’s mask, the moustache. Or, as a further safeguard, raise whiskers.
’Tis thus some of the health authorities advise. A fuzzy growth, whether on lip or jowl, they explain, is a germ strainer. The burglarious bacillus, trying to break in, has about as much chance as a camel at the needle’s eye or a carrot in a colandar.
If the moustahe or whiskers prove to be real preventatives, lots of Salt Lake men who pine to retire from an ailing world will take the hirsute veil. Faces which would have been displayed merely as faces may take on the aspect of sylvan retreats and bosky dells. Razor and scythe will be laid away and phizes will be allowed to sprout in all their wild carefree abandon. Familiar countenances will be concealed behind an impenetrable camouflage and the only recognizable features when friend meets friend will be a pair of eyes, a twinkling nose and two untrammeled ears.
The local Adonis, whose finely-chiseled beauty won the hearts of all feminine beholders, will appear in his bewhiskered role as plain as a welcome mat. The homely citizen will resemble a discarded Christmas tree, which has reached a sere and yellow past. It will be a sad day for the barbers, but the hedge trimmers and landscape gardeners may build up a profitable business.
If Salt Lake men decide to go in for moustaches and whiskers, the caravan-series may become strangely quiet. For not a one of them will have the hardihood to order soup.
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
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| Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping |
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| Noel Martin exhibition poster |
By that time, I had published a number of articles and one book on art and camouflage. When I learned that Martin had been a WWII camoufleur, I arranged to meet with him for lunch. We talked about his camouflage service, and I jotted down some cryptic notes. I no longer know their whereabouts (although I have them somewhere), but one thing that I do recall is that he mentioned several others whom he knew who had also served as camoufleurs. Of those I clearly remember, one was Victor Christ-Janer (1915-2008).
•••
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
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| Walter K. Pleuthner at age 82 |
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| Walter Pleuthner's WWI ship camouflage scheme |
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| Magazine Cover / Walter Pleuther / 1909 |
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| Magazine interior featuring Pleuthner home / 1909 |
Pleuthner’s wife died from a heart ailment in 1957. He lived for thirteen additional years. His newspaper obituary reads: “His techniques ranged from American impressionism to the unusual use of found objects. He wrote humorous anecdotes and philosophical essays. An architect by profession, he created many of the Gothic and Tudor style homes in Scarsdale and neighboring towns.” He died on December 2, 1970.
The Pleuthners had no children. After his wife’s death, he continued to live alone in their large residence in Scarsdale (although it isn’t entirely clear if this was the original house from 1909, or perhaps a later equivalent from 1920). What is certain is that he had difficulty in maintaining the house. In 1963, it caught on fire, but was not structurally damaged. Soon after, it caught on fire on two other occasions, followed by vandalism and thefts. Concerns were increasingly voiced by area residents, fire safety officials and the village board. Some people urged that the house be condemned and dismantled “as a danger.” This debate provoked a longtime Pleuthner friend and former neighbor to publish an objection in the Scarsdale Inquirer on November 22, 1967.
“We all know Walter’s eccentricities,” the letter to the editor said, “and it is easy to criticize them. With less formal education than some, Walter, through his own efforts, became an excellent architect. He built expensive and admirable houses as far away as Pennsylvania and several in Westchester County…”
The request to raze the Pluethner’s home should be denied, the writer urged. “Walter has suffered several serious misfortunes and since Mrs. Pleuthner’s death, he has mostly lived alone with his paintings and sculpture. His house has suffered damage from fires but appears structurally sound. He is now an old man.”
One cannot help but wonder why Pleuthner was regarded as “eccentric,” even among his defenders and friends. One early indication may be a 1941 news article titled “Tipsy House” in the American Builder magazine.
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| Tipsy House: No hurricane; just a bad spill |
Pleuthner ran into unforessen difficulties, the article reported, “with a model house he bought, cut into two sections and tried to move to another site. After a lot of figuring, he started out at dawn one morning with the first section on a big trailer. Things went all right until they rounded a sharp curve on a hill. At that point the house got tipsy, rolled off the trailer and landed on its side. The house wasn’t damaged, but it got Architect Pleuthner into all sorts of trouble with various people, including the Traffic Department, who objected to having a main highway blocked. Thousands of people who had inspected the house [earlier] when it was known as the ‘Home for Better Living,’ sponsored by Westchester Lighting Company, were intrigued by the sight ot the house, complete with shutters, slate roof and equipment, laying on its side by the road, where it stayed for several days.”
But the straw that eventually broke the authorities’ back was the increasingly disheveled state of his large self-built Tudor home. At the time he built the house, we are told in an article in Progressive Architecture magazine, it “was no more pixyish than many another in the high Eclectic period, and was distinguished only by having true half-timber construction, a massive braced frame with brick nogging. Loving handmade things and solid workmanship, he had the house put together by craftsmen who used a minimal amount of millwork and ready-sawn lumber. One of the timbers in the living room is a heavy stick from the privateer Hornet of War of 1812 fame. Originally, the house reflected in a conventional way Pleuthner’s triple artistic role as architect, painter…and sculptor, as fragments of old ironwork and woodwork and paintings accumulated on the walls. The great living room was the rehearsal room of the Wayside Players, an amateur group that included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and the cartoonist Rollin Kirby. At some point, the cultured clutter to be expected in an artist’s house passed over into whimsy, and Pleuthner decided to work on the walls, ceilings, floors, and furnishings of the various interiors. The kitchen at one period was transformed into an Italian garden. Floorboards were painted to imitate polychromed tiles. Other floors were carved out and inlaid with mosaic. A bathroom scale had the outlines of two feet painted on the platform, while the dial became a screaming baby face. Unpleasant book bindings were painted white, with code words daubed on the spines in red. An automobile hood became a canopy over the entrance to a summer house. And more and more odds and ends were added inside and out. In 1963, the house caught fire, but its substantial construction saved it. …the house is now in sad shape. The authorities claim that it is unsafe, and want to tear it down, but Pleuthner is confident that he can restore it. This winter, the house was leaky, drafty, and uninhabitable, but Pleuthner is already experimenting with the textural effects created on the floor by the latest fire.”
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| Pleuthner home interior in 1968 |
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| Chalk talk panel sequence |
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| Herb Hake, chalk talk drawings |
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| Captain William J. Aylward |
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| William J. Aylward |
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| William J. Aylward |
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| William J. Aylward |
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| William J. Aylward |
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| Poster, Index of American Design |
If people know about the New Deal Art Projects, it is most likely because they’re familiar with the Works Progress Administration or WPA (see poster above), in which the US Government commissioned unemployed American artists to create public murals for permanent installation in post office lobbies throughout the country. A surprising number of these have survived, and some of them remain on view in local post offices throughout the country.
What is less well-known is the Index of American Design (1953-1942), in which other unemployed artists (not studio "fine artists" but men and women who had previously worked as designers and illustrators, commonly disparaged as “commercial artists”) were hired not to make “creative” murals but to document examples of vintage American crafts (including folk art), through precise, detailed renderings. Among the things included in the Index of American Design were historic children’s rocking horses, carved ship figureheads, folk pottery, handmade clothing and fabrics, cast iron toy banks, antique furniture, weather vanes and other architectural ornaments, and so on.
These were all beautifully documented in watercolor renderings, in exacting detail and in color. Miraculously, 18,257 of these have been preserved, and are housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. These images are in public domain, and can be accessed online here. To commemorate that archive (as well as the graphic designers who made them), earlier this year, I designed and posted online a series of posters about a few of the items it features.
Among the artists commissioned to make Index of American Design renderings was Perkins Harnly. In addition, he also served briefly as a wartime camouflage instructor. While working for the Index of American Design, Harnly’s supervisor had been a Harvard-trained art museum administrator named Lloyd LaPage Rollins (1890-1970), who had also been director of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. According to Harnley, Rollins was gay and was an avid collector of outlandish Victorian-era artifacts, which today would be regarded as “camp.” His housemate and associate was, as Harnly described him, “an attractive pet Scotsman.”
Interestingly, as revealed by Harnly’s biographer Sarah Burns, Harnly himself was gay and would later become notorious for cross-dressing and related misbehavior. Rollins was (in Harnly’s words) “my WPA Projects boss.” It was apparently through Rollins that Harnly was commissioned to make illustrations for the Index of American Design, some of which were rather large, measuring twenty-two by thirty-one inches. Harnly greatly enjoyed this assignment, in which he apparently had few restrictions. In an interview many years later, the artist recalled the freedom he had in completing this project that continued for years:
On the WPA I had all the time in the world. Every plate took four weeks at fourteen hours a day seven days a week to paint…just one took four hundred hours to render so meticulously and none took less than two hundred hours.
These fact-based yet fanciful renderings of Victorian interiors were well-received by government administrators, and that success was underscored when they were later exhibited publicly (twice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and reproduced and written about in magazines. Two examples are posted here.
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| Perkins Harnly, Index of American Design |
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| Perkins Harnly, Index of American Design |
From the little that is known about Harnly’s involvement in camouflage, it appears to have been minor in comparison to the work he did for the Index of American Design. When America entered World War II, as Harnly later remembered in a Smithsonian interview, “we were put on defense projects…” He was assigned to camouflage as a civilian instructor, and sent to Fort Belvoir VA. There, he taught camouflage to officers, among them William Pahlmann, a well-known interior designer, and Gene Davis, the art director at Good Housekeeping magazine. The person in charge of camouflage at Fort Belvoir was Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the famous American sculptor.
When that assignment ended, Harnly was sent back to California, where his supervisor was once again Lloyd Rollins, his former “WPA boss,” but this time he “taught a class on camouflage in the attic of a midtown fire station.” Soon however, that class abruptly crashed and burned when Harnly had a falling out with Rollins’ associate (his so-called “pet Scotsman”), who stormed out in the middle of a work session, whereupon the course was cancelled.
Harnly lived for 85 years. He was colorful, to say the least. Sarah Burns’ recent book about his life is titled The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends (Port Townsend WA: Process Media, 2021). Be prepared for some scandalous content. It is a highly detailed account of the life of a person who grew up in a setting of what he himself described as “trashy Tobacco Road types” in the dregs of rural Nebraska. When interviewed at age 80, he claimed that his birth was premature, by seven months, when he was born in a “pauper’s farmhouse.” With no access to medical care, much less an incubator, he was wrapped in cotton, placed in a shoe box, and kept warm inside an oven.
When he was four or five years old, the family moved to Lincoln NE, where they lived adjacent to the Lyric Theatre. Over the years, his proximity to that stage led to his fascination with linear perspective, painting, and set design. His interest in art had begun as a child, but he did not pursue it intently until he was hired by the WPA for their New Deal art program. It was that opportunity, Harnly recalled, that gave him “the reason, the encouragement, the research, the material, and I really went to town.” In the end, he completed a total of eighty-one renderings of Victorian interiors for the Index of American Design.
There is much more to this story of course, far too much to include in a blog post. But two other aspects of Harnly’s life are of particular interest. First, his paternal grandfather, a Nebraska farmer named Benjamin Harnly, enjoyed considerable success in building elaborate Queen Anne residences in Lincoln. He constructed at least sixteen, the most famous of which was the Bryan House, which he built for William Jennings Bryan.
Second, Harnly worked temporarily for MGM in Hollywood. This resulted from a showing in New York of twenty-two of his Victorian interior renderings for the Index of American Design. In an exhibition titled “I Remember That,” they were displayed on the mezzanine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 1942 to April 1943. Among the people who viewed them there was an MGM film director named Albert Lewin. He was just then preparing to produce a film version of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In that story, circumstances are such that a painted portrait of its youthful, handsome protagonist, Dorian Gray, is reduced to putrefaction—as if by otherworldly means—as the physical man himself decays.
Based on his reaction to Harnly’s renderings of Victorian room interiors, Lewin persuaded him to relocate to Hollywood and to contribute to the film as a set design consultant. At the same time, Lewin also contracted two painters, who were brothers from Chicago, named Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, and his identical twin Malvin Marr Albright. They too were brought to Hollywood to work on site on the film.
The original agreement was that Malvin would complete a portrait of Dorian Gray (looking both handsome and youthful), to be used at the film’s beginning, while Ivan would provide a comparable portrait of the same anti-hero, in a disturbing state of decay, at the end of the film. Ivan Albright’s (now-famous) painting (reproduced below) was used in the finished film, but the painting by his brother was eventually omitted, and replaced by an alternate portrait by a Portuguese artist, Henrique Medina. The paintings by the Albright twins upstaged Harnly’s achievements as a "sketch artist" and set designer. Ivan Albright’s painting was widely publicized, while Harnly is not even mentioned in the film credits.
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
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| Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943) |
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| Cover / Louis J. Treviso (1917) |
•••
There is an additional curious aspect of this same issue of The Graphic, a periodical that typically reported on the activities and achievements of notable citizens in Southern California society. There is in this issue a column titled “This Week in Society,” which includes a detailed account of an elborate “camouflage-themed” wedding celebration for a prominent couple in San Diego, in which Lapham Loomis Brundred married Jean Miller.
In December 1917, the US had only just entered World War I, and had only begun to recruit artists, designers and architects to serve as camouflage artists, also known as camoufleurs. Among civilian society groups, it soon became common to encourage support of the war, increase enlistments, and engage in fundraising through "camouflage-themed" costume balls, rallies, and other public and private events. The article excerpted here provides a description of an early example of those events in 1917 at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego—
Among the many artistic affairs given at the famous watering place [Hotel del Coronado] was the unique dinner Friday evening with which Mr. John J. Hernan entertained, honoring Miss Jean Miller and her fiance Captain Lapham Loomis Brundred, whose wedding in St Paul’s Church, San Diego, was one of the brilliant military and social events in the seaside city. The settings for the affair were all “camouflage,” from the entrance into the communicating trench, where boughs of trees lined the walls. An immense airplane of crimson roses and foliage was suspended overhead, and great baskets and vases of pink rosebuds and foliage added a touch. The first line trench, marked by an immense sign, led into the fortifications (in the green banquet room). Here the entire room was transformed into a wooded valley, the immense fort “camouflaged” with canvas, and strewn with leaves and branches of eucalyptus, tiny electric lights glowing through the foliage. As the party emerged through the connecting door, the “immense guns” boomed forth a welcome, followed by tiny machine guns, and the orchestra, also camouflaged behind banks of trees, played “Over There.” When the immense white “camouflaged canvas” was removed, the table represented a miniature scene of the valley, hills, mountains and desert, at one end Balboa Park camp and at the other “Brundredville,” the sign posts reading “Some City Somewhere in America.” In the center of the plain rose the Rocky Mountains with cactus and rocks, the desert stretch of country reaching to “Brundredville.” On the other side was sunny California, with its wealth of roses and flowers, while around the whole ran the bridal train of its steel tracks bearing the bridal couple to their destination in “Brundredville.” Pink rosebuds and foliage ordered the tracks, and telegraph poles with their slender lines carried messages of congratulation, while tiny electric globes on tall posts lighted the way to happiness. The menu was especially camouflage, from the soup hidden beneath tin cans, butter pats under immense green bell peppers; crab Ravigotti, in Hearts of Lettuce; salted almonds in walnuts; olives in tomatoes; tenderloin of beef under crab shells; sherbet in rosy apples; Mallard duck beneath cabbage leaves; celery salad in carrot shells; creams in oranges, cakes in bread rolls and the demi-tasse in cocoanut shells. The hand-painted sketches of Coronado scenes marked covers for thirty guests. The whole affair was one of the most artistic ever given at the famous watering place. In the child’s vernacular “Everything was what it wasn’t,” being a clever explanation of the menu and entire effect.
SEE ALSO
CAMOUFLAGE MAN SUICIDE, Naval Artist Puts Bullet Into Brain, in Boston Post, March 27, 1919—
Magazine Cover, Arthur Hutchins
The body of Arthur Hutchins [1887-1919], 32 years old, a talented young artist, who had been missing from his home in Wollaston since early Monday, was found lying in his studio at 52 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, yesterday morning, with a bullet wound in his head.
The discovery of his body was made by a boy in the office of Joe Mitchell Chapple, who occupies an office in the same building, and to whom Mrs. Hutchins telephoned yesterday in an endeavor to locate the missing man, after a search for him among relatives and friends had proved fruitless.
Mr. Hutchins had done camouflage work in the service of the navy during the war and since his dicharge a short time ago, had been engaged in making drawings for several magazines. Twice during the past few months he had suffered from attacks of influenza, and his general health had been poor since leaving his work in the navy. A wife and two children survive.
See other accounts of same incident here
Above A page of camouflage-related comic drawings by World War I French illustrator and toy designer André Hellé, as published in La Baïonnette, c1916. 
La Baïonnette
•••
Jerrold A. Morris, 100 Years of Canadian Drawings. New York: Methuen, 1980, p. 10—
The lover of drawings has the advantage of being in close contact with the artist’s original concept conveyed in a relatively uncomplicated medium. Drawing, in the widest sense of the term, is the linear element in art least susceptible to manipulation by what [William] Blake called “Blotting” and the Pre-Raphaelites called “Slosh”—we might call it “fudging.” Among painters are many masters of camouflage, what [J.A.D.] Ingres meant when he said that drawing is “the probity of art.”
Above Cover of Railroad Stories magazine, January 1932, supposedly showing the camouflage of an Allied railroad engine during World War I. The illustration is by Emmett Watson (1893-1955), whose work was widely published in popular newsstand magazines between the World Wars.
Emmett Watson (c1932)
•••
Robert K. Tomlin, American engineers behind the battle lines in France. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1918—
It is obvious that this subject [wartime camouflage] cannot be written about in detail. The familiar illustrations often published in magazines and newspapers are the obvious and theatrical ones, seldom used. The real camouflage would not make an interesting picture, because no one would see it in a photograph.
