marvelous designs and colors calculated to confuse

Above Just when we think we've found everything, suddenly something new appears. The images above and below were made by British artist Frank H. Mason as illustrations for Stephen King-Hall, The Diary of a U-boat Commander. London: Hutchinson and Company, 1920. I have no idea of the book's veracity; in one library record, for example, it is classified as "fiction."

•••

Kaleidoscope of Ships: Camouflage in Eastern Harbors Look Like Futurist Nightmare in Journal and Tribune (Knoxville TN), March 8, 1918—

If some ancient mariner were to return to one of our eastern ports these days he would think the shipping world had gone mad. The submarine has called forth the camouflage artist, and the camouflage artist has painted our trans-Atlantic vessels with bizarre designs in all colors of the rainbow.

Imaginative writers used to dwell on the kaleidoscope of shipping in great harbors like New York. The term is thoroughly applicable today, for our harbors are as colorful as operatic pageants. Half of some great ship will be painted a delicate baby blue and the other half will be an arrangement in great circles and stripes and bands in black, green, yellow and pink. Another vessel will appear dressed in a succession of waving colors ranging from pink to purple. A steamship no longer resembles a steamship. It looks like a futurist nightmare.

There are two rival schools of marine camouflage. One works on the theory of low visibility and the other one strives for what is called the dazzle effect. The low visibility camoufleurs paint the ships in waving lines with the basic light ray tones—reds and greens and violets—with the idea of having the vessels merge with the atmosphere and disappear. The dazzle school goes in for a system of marvelous designs and colors calculated to confuse the aim of enemy gunners.

Even our battle ships have succumbed to the lure of strange pigmentation. The sober "fighting gray" battle ship color is a thing of the past. Our fighting craft go to their grim business in the war zone made up like [the] Russian ballet.—Independent.

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 /  

railway car reminiscent of wartime ship camouflage

WAGR Railway Car [AI colorized]

TESTS FOR DIESEL'S SAFETY PAINT, COMMENT WELCOMED, CRISS-CROSS EYE-CATCHER in Northern Times (Camarvon, Western Australia, Australia), March 7, 1947, p. 5—

Following complaints from the country that WAGR [Western Australia Government Railways] cream and green diesel-electric rail cars merged into the countryside background colors, thereby endangering the safety of road travelers at level crossings, a novel attempt is being made to ensure public safety.

Each end of a diesel-electric rail car has been painted with diagonally converging black and white lines, four inches wide, producing a rather startling and bizarre effect reminiscent of ship camouflage during the war [World War II].

While this color scheme certainly detracts from the generally pleasant and smart appearance of the diesel cars, it shows the Railway Department is ready and willing to do all possible for public safety.

[A] Car so painted is under test to ascertain whether it is now more readily visible to country road users when approaching railway crossings and the department will welcome the comments of country residents.

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 / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

geological dazzle painting / as in a certain small island

agate pattern

Author and exact source unknown, in Blackwood's Magazine, c1922—

[The appearance of a certain small island] is very remarkable. It consists of a rounded lump of hills, with three or four central conical peaks, seven hundred feet high. The lower parts, all completely barren, are striped. and patched, and barred with a geological "dazzle-painting" in ochre and red, brown, purple, and buff, while the surmounting cones, in strong contrast, are pure white. The whole effect is that of some monstrous pudding, standing on the blue-and-white plate of the sea, over whose apex has been poured (in pre-war days!) a large jug of thick cream.

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

striped and splashed and dotted with disruptive colors

unidentified WWI dazzle-painted ship (AI color), c1918

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer. NYC: Harper and Brothers, 1925, pp. 280-281—

The snub nosed transport sludges slowly through the Narrows in the rain. Sergeant-Major O'Keefe and Private First Class Dutch Robertson stand in the lee of the deckhouse looking at the liners at anchor in quarantine and the low wharf cluttered shores.

"Look some of em still got their warpaint—Shippin Board boats.... Not worth the powder to blow em up."

"The hell they aint," said Joey O'Keefe vaguely. "Gosh little old New York's goin to look good to me.…"

"Me too Sarge, rain or shine I dont care."

They are passing close to a mass of steamers anchored in a block, some of them listing to one side or the other, lanky ships with short funnels, stumpy ships with tall funnels red with rust, some of them striped and splashed and dotted with putty color and blue and green of camouflage paint…

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

striped camouflage applied as to conceal its direction

Above British steamship Ascutney (center), showing camouflage, with Corle Castle on the right, 1918.

•••

Brian Freeland, “Blue Days at Sea” in Ottawa Citizen (Canada). August 10, 1944—

The storm blew over and the rest of our days was spent in chipping paint, at target practice, and applying camouflage to the ship’s boats…Our last job was finishing the new zebra stripe camouflage on the ship’s motor launch. The stripes are so applied that it is difficult to tell whether one has three boats approaching, whether two are going in opposite directions, or what you will. Our last naval act was to lower her tenderly into the sea, and beam with pride as, like Stephen Leacock’s Ronald, she rode madly off in all directions.

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' circu

paint streaks on family to practice camouflage at home

Above Coles Phillips, illustration titled “Thoroughbreds” from A Gallery of Girls (New York: Century Company, 1911).

•••

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

a primer for the wee ones on the value of camouflage

Sarah L. Raymo, Camouflaged Teddy Bear Patent

MILTON HAVEN CUB NOTES in Haverfordwest and Milford Haven Telegraph (Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales), July 9, 1919—

A TALK ABOUT "CAMOUFLAGE."
I suppose a good number of you Cubs have heard the word "Camouflage"? These big words puzzle some of the older folk sometimes, and when they see a word which they do not understand, they go and look for a book called a "dictionary" which explains the meaning.

DECEIVING THE ENEMY.
When the word "camouflage" was first brought to the public notice, people wondered what it meant.

We people who live near the coast soon found out what " camouflage" meant. At first we saw most peculiar painted ships, and as you looked at them, you could imagine they represented all kinds of wild animals. To look at them in the distance, they did not look like ships, and really it was puzzling, and when we turned to our neighbor and said, " look at that funny ship," they said she is " camouflaged."

Now I wonder if you Cubs understand why those ships were painted in this way? Why was the ship "camouflaged"?

It was to deceive the enemy.

NATURE'S CAMOUFLAGE.
You little Cubs have little gardens at school, you learn to grow all kinds of flowers and things. When your flowers grow and bear nice green leaves, sometimes you wonder why they don't grow much nicer, the petals of the flowers are all eaten away, and scarcely a green leaf on them. Now, if you look very, very closely and very, very hard, you will find tiny little flies, slugs, and insects creeping round the flowers.

Do you know why it is you never can see those little pests? It is because nature has "camouflaged" them to protect them from their enemy. Nature has made them the same color as the plants they live upon or at least a similar color, and they are in this peculiar color to deceive their enemy. 

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

a dazzling pair of scarecrows—or tailors' dummies

Cover / Dazzle News Online

 

CAMOUFLAGED SKIRTS in Thames Star (New Zealand), Vol 52 No 13729, June 22, 1918, p. 4—

The latest concerning camouflage comes from "Lady Kitty," a Melbourne writer, who says:—The "camouflage" skirt! It is here. Oh! Oh! Oh! The cretonne skirt was bad enough; but the camouflage skirt is a sartorial disaster. There is not an article in the whole of one's wardrobe that could possibly "go" with the skirt. It made its first appearance in Sydney, where six and eight guineas are being asked—and given—for these camouflage skirts. They are of silk, but such silk! It is most suitably called "crazy." This demented silk starts at being a wonderful pattern in colors which absolutely pale the gorgeousness of all Eastern color magnificence, when suddenly, it is camouflaged with great patches of dullish background. Most weird! Camouflage, you know, is to make things appear other than what they really are—to disguise them, in fact, so that the crazy silk sets out to be a very striking fabric when it is suddenly camouflaged by broad strips of plain color which quite disguise its original identity, but really make it more striking still. Camouflage parties, at which people wear camouflaged fancy dress, have become quite a rage for fund-raising purposes; and if guests are ingenious enough the result is screamingly tunny. From start to finish nothing is what it seems. Even the host and hostess are represented by a couple of scarecrows, or a pair of tailors' dummies; and the supper table laden with what is apparently a delicious repast, is found to be but a faked delightfulness. Camouflage parties can be immensely entertaining when worked out by clever brains.

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

Camoufleur Donates Materials to Brooklyn Museum

US Navy photograph of ship camoufleur Everett L. Warner

Brooklyn Museum. Report Upon the Conditions and Progress of the Museums for the Year Ending 1919, p. 16—

Mr. Everett L. Warner, the etcher, gave to the Library a quantity of material on camouflage consisting of photographs, diagrams, postcards, etc., which was a welcome addition to our file of such material.

RELATED LINK

Disruption versus dazzle

B.J.O. Nordfeldt's connection to WWI ship camouflage

Portrait of B.J.O. Nordfeldt

Above This image is cited on Wikipedia Commons as a portrait of Swedish-American artist Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt. An etching dated 1935, it is presumably a self-portrait since he is also listed as having made it (yet, oddly the signature seems to read Schneider). It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chicago Society of Etchers.

We have blogged about Nordfeldt before, and with good reason. As we noted in an earlier post in 2019, Nordfeldt designed ship camouflage for the US Shipping Board during World War I in San Francisco. He was a fascinating character, with an all but unbelievable breadth of interests and capabilities. In addition to his involvement in ship camouflage, he was also an early participant in the art colony at Provincetown MA (he designed sets for the Provincetown Players) and eventually settled in New Mexico, where he was associated with the Taos Society of Artists.

Recently we ran across a news article about an exhibition of his artwork, titled “Nordfeldt Shows Interesting Work” in the Oakland Tribune, November 10, 1918, p. 6. That review concludes with this curious note:

Mr. Nordfeldt is in San Francisco at the rquest of the government, in charge of the camouflage department of the shipyards.

Would he tell us, if we cross our hearts not to tell, what the plan is that he and his conferes are following with the ships that go down to the sea?

There are those among us—good Americans at that—who are wondering “Who’s looney now?”

The USS Western Spirit (shown below) was most likely one of the ships whose dazzle camouflage Nordfeldt was responsible for.

USS Western Spirit c1918 (digital coloring)

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

World War I marine camouflage exhibited in Brooklyn

Above An official US Navy photograph (digital coloring) of Lieutenant Harold Van Buskirk, who was head of the Camouflage Section (comprised of two sub-sections) in the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair during World War I. He is applying the finishing touches on the "dazzle" camouflage pattern on a scale model of an American ship. Notice the completed models on the background storage shelf.

Once the model was completed, it was taken to a testing theatre, equipped with a periscopic viewing device and changeable seascape backgrounds. The viewer was challenged to estimate the angle of the model as it was positioned on an adjustable platform (as shown in a photograph of Navy camoufleurs Van Buskirk and Kenneth MacIntire ).

•••

Exhibit of Marine Camouflage in Science, Vol 50 No 1287, c1919, p. 205—

The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly describes a special exhibit held at the museum of models, design. and other objects illustrating the practice and some of the principles of marine camouflage. The exhibition was arranged by the curator of the department of natural science, and was made possible through the interest and cooperation of Mr. William A. Mackay, of the United States Shipping Board, camoufleur of the Second Naval District, and Lieutenants Harold Van Buskirk and Everett L. Warner, of the Camouflage Section, Bureau of Construction and Repair, United States Navy. Numerous other naval officers, members of the American Society of Marine Camoufleurs, and others, also contributed to the success of the exhibit by lending illustrative material.

A aeries of photographs made in the naval laboratories at Washington DC, and Rochester NY, showed successive stages of the experimental work by means of which the colors and patterns employed in the camouflage designs had been arrived at. These illustrations included views of the elaborate periscopic theater at Rochester, in which painted models of ships were tested under conditions which simulated, in all essential respects, the open ocean. The history of marine camouflage was briefly traced by means of labels and colored models, while approved as well as experimental designs of the "low-visibility" type, the British and American "dazzles," and the French system, were shown by means of models, photographs and colored lithographs issued by the Navy Department.

A case in the center of the exhibition room contained a miniature convoy of transports in charge of a cruiser and a flotilla of destroyers, each camouflaged model an exact replica of its namesake, or, rather, the original working model from which the transport or war vessel had been camouflaged. A simple, illuminated theater, equipped with a periscope, enabled visitors to observe a model as if from a submarine point of view, and moreover, demonstrated surprisingly well the distortion and other types of illusion produced by the camoufleur's design. 

a claim about the origin of WWI US ship camouflage

Lake Pachuta duing WWI

Above Photograph of USS Lake Pachuta of Saginaw from an advertisement for Saginaw Shipbuilding Co. in International Marine Engineering (June 1919), p. 95—
•••

Until recently, I had never heard the name of Michael V. Dailey. While searching for leads in my research of the involvement of artists and others in the design of camouflage, I came across an article on a person with that name.

He was born in Massachusetts in 1872, and died at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Jamaica Plain, in Boston, February 2, 1959. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, but he evidently played some role in World War I. The article headline makes the claim that M.V. DAILEY DEVISED CAMOUFLAGE OF SHIPS DURING WORLD WAR I (The Boston Globe, February 3, 1959). Really? How interesting, since I have never run across his name in more than fifty years of researching the subject, during which my focus has frequently been on WWI ship camouflage.

But the article goes further. At two locations in the text, it appears to claim that not only did Mr. Dailey contribute to ship camouflage, it states that he was the “originator of ship camouflage during World War I.” A few lines later, more details are provided, as follow—

He was a special aide to the Secretary of War [which presumably refers to Newton Baker] in World War I when he received a special citation for his camouflage origination.

And so, I don’t know what to think. Is this true? Why haven’t I heard about it before? One has to wonder if there’s been some odd misunderstanding, inadvertent or otherwise. I suspect this sometimes happens, as when stories about one’s family’s past are repeated but not verified.

WWI horse striped like a zebra to hoodwink the enemy

Above Photograph from The Illustrated News (London), April 7, 1915, p. 48, with the following caption: STRIPED TO ELUDE THE ENEMY: A PONY DISGUISED AS A ZEBRA, ON THE GERMAN EAST AFRICAN BORDER. This photograph of an officer on active service in East Africa, mounted on a pony which has been dyed with permanganate of potash to resemble a zebra, must surely be the last word in war coloration and the mimicry of natural surroundings, for purposes of invisibility. The tawny tinge of khaki—very much the tint of a lion’s skin, by the way—sufficiently serves for the rider’s concealment amidst the forest shadows. The dying of light-colored and piebald and white horses has become a regulation practice among the cavalry in Europe in particular, as it has been stated, some of the German regiments at the front. In much the same way, heavy artillery guns and wagons are sometimes painted over with broad patches and daubs of the primary colors.

•••

Roe Fulkerson, “An Old Man in His Dotage” in Crescent Magazine: Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Vol 12 No 3 (May 1921), p. 22—

[A Shriner] came into our village the other day…There was no place to take him so I took him to a lunch club I belong to and there we heard a navy man tell the story of what the Navy did in the war. The man was a good talker and he laid particular stress on the wonderful science of camouflgae and how marvelous it was that they had discovered that by painting a war ship in alternating black and white stripes it completely destroyed the form of it and made it invisible at a comparatively short distance. He expatiated at great length on this. Keep that point in mind.

Then as I had no other addresses worthwhile I took my visiting Noble for a ride out to the zoo so he could look at the camels and sympathize with their lack of grace and explain to them how he, too, in other days had established records for going without water.

While we were looking at the camels we looked in the next yard and there were a lot of zebras with those same black and white stripes that the Navy man was just telling us about and we recalled that a zebra lives out on the vast plains of Africa and that the Almighty had for ages been camouflaging him with black and white stripes to break up his form so his enemies could not see him at a distance! Then we went for a ride in the country and passed over a bridge and were stopped by a gate and a bridge at a grade crossing and how do you suppose they had painted that railroad gate and that bridge so I would be sure to see from a distance and not run into them?

They had striped them in black and white like a zebra!

•••

Below WWI photograph of British soldiers in France. At the right is a captured German sentry box, marked by alternating stripes. 

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

the cat's pajamas / duplicitious color uses in nature

Until a few years ago, I used to give a slide talk called THE CAT'S PAJAMAS: Animal Camouflage / The Hidden Creatures in our Yards [above]. But the pandemic put a stop to that. So I repurposed the in-person slide talk (with considerable improvement) as a free online video called NATURE, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE: Duplicitous Uses of Color (as shown below), which continues to be popular.

 

dazzle-camouflaged corporate interior in West London

The headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is located in White City, West London, in a cluster of buildings commonly known as the BBC Media Village. Near the inside entrance of the Broadcast Center is an “art wall” that, in part, is a reminder of World War I-era dazzle-camouflaged ships. Designed by British artist Simon Patterson, its disruptive black and white stripes (as shown here) also includes the names of various people who have worked “behind the scenes” at that corporation.  For more information, see Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, The spaces of organization and the organization of space. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.

blending / assuming the look of an overturned stump

Above  Cartoon from Lilliput Magazine, date and artist unknown.

•••

Arthur Henry Howard Heming, The Drama of the Forests, Romance and Adventure.  Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Co, p. 61—

As regards trailing game, whether large or small, he [a Canadian Native American] cautioned me to watch my quarry carefully, and instantly to become rigid at the first sign that the game was about to turn round or raise its head to peer in my direction. More than that, I should not only remain motionless while the animal was gazing toward me, but I should assume at once some form that suggested the character of the surrounding trees or bushes or rocks. For example, among straight-boled, perfectly vertical trees, I should stand upright; among uprooted trees, I should assume the character of an overturned stump, by standing with inclined body, bent legs, and arms and fingers thrust out at such angles as to suggest the roots of a fallen tree. And he added that if I doubted the wisdom of such an act, I should test it at a distance of fifty or a hundred paces, and prove the difficulty of detecting a man who assumed a characteristic landscape pose among trees or rocks. That was years before the World War had brought the word camouflage into general use; for as a matter of fact, the forest Indians had been practicing camouflage for centuries and, no doubt, that was one reason why many of the Indians in the Canadian Expeditionary Force did such remarkable work as snipers.

Canadian camouflage artist Rowley Walter Murphy

Above Dazzle-camouflaged transport ship (AI colorized), 1942.

•••

Mary El Cane, "Staff and Nonsense" column, in Sketch (Ontario College of Art), February 27, 1947, p. 1—

Meet the Navy, in the person of Rowley [Walter] Murphy [1891-1975]. Many years of yachting since 1898, he insists readied him for full wartime effort on destroyers corvettes, ad infinitum. Canaling was a specialty with him, and also a possible excuse for some sketching of masters and mates of the tugs and freighters on the Welland Canal. He spent some time sailing the pilot schooner off Halifax harbor, swishing around in a relation of the Bluenose. Admiral Jones kept him busy for a time on the designing of naval camouflage, a job more exacting than people realize. (“Karl, vos is das on dur distance an iceberger?” “Yah, Hermann, idz torpedering us! Mervy doned id agen!”)

the scintillations of your wit, lambent but innoucous

Above This strikingly-costumed figure (pre-camouflage, but visually “dazzling” nevertheless) is extracted from a theatrical poster from 1897. It was an advertisement for Wang, a comic operetta first performed in New York City. 

The title role, as shown here, was played by Broadway actor William DeWolf Hopper (1858-1935), an outsized personality and—at 6 foot 5 inches and 230 pounds—an outsized physical presence as well. He had a powerful booming voice, and a boundless sense of humor. 

His celebrity was due in part to the popularity of his on-stage recitations of the widely known baseball poem by Ernest Thayer, titled “Casey at the Bat.” Having married and divorced with unusual frequency (not to mention reputed affairs), he was sometimes said to have been the “husband of his country.” 

His fifth wife was the famous gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, and their son was the actor William Hopper (William DeWolf Hopper, Jr.), who played a detective named Paul Drake in the Perry Mason televison series.

•••

Guiseppe Garibaldi—

Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.

•••

A.D. Godley—

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

•••

Edward Meyrick Goulburn—

Let the scintillations of your wit be like the coruscations of summer lightning, lambent but innoucuous.

when father mangles celery with unctuous enthusiasm

Above A vintage photograph (source unknown) of a highly unusual example of ship camouflage during World War I in which the shape of the vessel has been made confusing by applying warped perspective shapes to the bow, while also attaching triangular forms to the masts, smoke stack, and upper deck surfaces, as a means of distorting the ship’s silhouette.

Note Since this was initially posted, we have been told by Aryeh Wetherhorn that this is a photograph of a Russian patrol boat, the Kondor, in the Baltic Sea.

•••

Everett L Warner, in Summary of Points to be Made in First Part of General Lecture on Marine Camouflage, unpublished typescript (n.d.)—

[The] British called [the] ultimate type [of WWI ship camouflage] “dazzle painting,” and this name, which we also used, was in itself a source of misunderstanding. [There was an] effort in [the US] Navy Department to find [a] more descriptive name, and to differentiate [the] American system from its British prototype. Suggestions [were] invited. Three days leave [was] offered [as a reward, but] no one secured it. One man suggested “jazz painting,” [and] I have always thought that this name summed up accurately the popular idea.

•••

FLORIBEL’S FLAPPERGRAMS in The Lafayette Journal and Courier (Lafayette IN), May 17, 1923— 

Floribel says: That jazz record on the fireside phonograph is mighty fittin’ at times. Put it on, say, when father mangles celery with unctuous enthusiasm or when he swiffles soup or swings a wicked saucer. A full-tone needle and enough jazz may help distract the awe-stricken dinner guests in the celery crisis. That same jazz may drown out the midnight racket of those dropped shoes in the parental bedroom upstairs. Any girl will tell you that when the “date” is a likely one, and a bit skittish, ‘most any household camouflage is justified, even jazz. At that, the average jazz record is no worse than the Teething-Baby Blues.

Note There are no full-color photographs of WWI ship camouflage. The original of the black and white image above has been digitally “colorized” using AI software. While its light / dark values are accurate, the choice and location of colors, even when plausible, may not be literally correct.

RELATED LINKS

Optical science meets visual art 

Disruption versus dazzle 

Chicanery and conspicuousness 

Under the big top at Sims' circus

immense saw teeth and cubistic stripes that were not

Louis Biedermann (1918)

Above I was so pleased to find this. It is a very rare full size two-page illustration spread having to do with World War I ship camouflage. Drawn by a phenomenal (if largely unknown) illustrator named Louis Biedermann (1874-1957), it was published as a center spread in the Los Angeles Evening Express, on Sunday, August 18, 1918, perhaps in an entertainment section. This is not its original color (I've colorized it), since presumably it was printed by a four-color halftone process (more or less equivalent to CMYK). Of the very few copies that may still exist, the colors have most likely faded by now, and the newsprint on which it was printed has degraded.

In an online posting by Geographicus, an antique maps dealer in New York, the Illinois Daily Free Express (no date) is quoted as having said—

[Louis] Biedermann is panoramic. He is panoramic in his thinking. His mental as well as his optical perspective presents a complete and extended view of all directions. The breadth of his understanding is more panoramic, perhaps, than his art.

Too bad this illustration cannot be seen more clearly here. It is fantastic and highly detailed, so does not do well at a very small size. See magnified detail below.

In the bottom left corner of the illustration is an explanatory box that reads—

CAMOUFLAGED! How the Erstwhile Merchant Fleet Looks in Its War Paint.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When we practice to deceive

—especially when the web is woven of shuttling ships, and the destined victim of the deception is some U-boat skipper squinting through a hastily protruded periscope and vainly trying to get the range of a moving target from which most of the horizontal and vertical bearing points have been eliminated, while whorls, saw-teeth and triangles of black, white, gray, blue, green and pink blend dizzily into the shifting wave outlines of the seascape. We are well past the practice stage, though, and there are days when the results of ship camouflage turn New York Harbor, for instance, into a floating nightmare. For the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of other readers who never see the waterfront, Mr. Biedermann has indicated here the general effect of the “motley rout,” though purposely avoiding any approach to a portrait of any actual ship.

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HOW NEW YORK HARBOR IS PROTECTED FROM U-BOATS: Every Agency of Naval War Seen: Painted Ships and Weird Effects on Every Hand, but the Business of Getting Men and Supplies “Over There” Goes on as Though There Were No New Menace at Hand, in St Louis Post Dispatch (St Louis MO), January 23, 1918 [from an article published earlier in the Springfield Republican (Springfield MA), no date]—

It was in the lower harbor, below the Liberty Statue, that New York began to show as a port on a war basis. Here were the camouflaged ships at anchor. There were hundreds of them, steamers, schooners, tankers, all ages, shape and sizes. Blue, black and white, all shades of gray, occasionally green, the stripes ran up and down their sides. There were wildly zig-zagging stripes, stripes that spread outward and upward from the center of the ship’s side like a fan, stripes that curved upward, terminating in a superstructure of the bridge in lines like those of the bow; horizontal stripes jagged on their upper edge with immense saw teeth; cubistic stripes that were not, strictly speaking, stripes at all, but like the patterns of a crazy quilt.

But camouflage does not show to best advantage on gray mornings. It does not dazzle at near view, and at the first sight of the ships, coming among them suddenly from around the end of Governor’s Island, the definiteness of outline was a mild shock to preconceived notions. Nevertheless, the purring of the airplane motor overhead was not plainly audible. To the right of the course, off Staten Island, lay a group of old warships at anchor, but with steam up, lookouts posted and guns trained. Far down the harbor, between the anchored shipping and the Narrows, a squadron of patrol boats, lean of bow, square of stern and built for speed, passed leisurely back and forth across the water, one of them dragging with it a captive balloon of the sausage type which perked along with peculiar and rather ridiculous motions, as though resenting each tug of the rope. On nearer view the lookouts on these smaller craft were also seen to be posted, and at their neat little three-inch stern guns, a group of husky sailors invariably “stood by.” Whatever camouflage might be worth at that short range, it was plain that other precautions were all being taken.

A Hole in the Ship
By the time these details of the protecting fleet were visible, the virtue of the camouflage was apparent also. First a ship with a broad blue-gray band zig-zagging up its center through the smokestack seemed suddenly, at a range of perhaps half a mile, to have developed a hole in its middle. One seemed to be looking through it at sky, and, to ocular appearances, except under the closest scrutiny, it ceased to be a ship at all, but some naval monstrosity split in two. At about the same distance another ship which lay with its bow pointed toward us, suddenly appeared to have turned about and to confront us with its stern. So marked was the illusion in this case that no among of scrutiny could separate the real from the illusion. This was the case, too, of another ship whose stern suddenly began to appear as a broadside.

The ship with the bow curve painted on the superstructure demonstrated a unique merit. Instead of one big ship. it gave the illusion of being two smaller ones, the bow of the first—the real one—seeming to be crossing the bow of the second—a fake one—at a narrow angle. Across even this slightly choppy water the saw-tooth design seemed to sink the ship in the wave motion until only the masts and the superstructure had anything like definite form. Only the fan-shaped camouflage and the distinctly cubist patterns retained at a mile, still a very fair torpedo range—anything like their actual outline, and it was easy to believe that with the fan it would be different when the spray was flying, that the crazy-quilt pattern would puzzle the eye of the keenest observer when the sea was a dazzle of bright sunlight and wave shadows. On the whole, right in the harbor, lying at anchor, these ships would form no perfect target at anything like a sportsman’s range.