Camouflage Artist | Gordon Stevenson

Model Painting Room (c1918)

Above is a wonderful photograph of US Navy camouflage artists during World War I. It was initially published on the title page of a magazine article called "Fooling the Iron Fish: The Inside Story of Marine Camouflage" in Everybody's Magazine (November 1919), pp. 102-109. The article was written by American artist Everett Longley Warner, was the officer in charge of the design subsection in Washington DC of the Navy's Camouflage Section. He is seated on the far left, while (from left to right) the other camoufleurs include Frederick Judd Waugh, John Gregory, Gordon Stevenson, Manley K. Nash (in the foreground), and Maurice O'Connell. However, this particular post is about Gordon Stevenson because we recently obtained new information and images about him from his granddaughter, a DuPont chemist.

Gordon Stevenson (1892-1982) was probably born in Chicago, to parents who had immigrated to the US from Scotland. He grew up in Chicago, where he attended the School of the Art Institute there. While still a student, he was awarded two mural commissions, one of which, titled Construction Site (1909) was installed at the Albert G. Lane Technical High School, while the other, The Landing at Jamestown (1910), was among five other murals (by other artists) about moments in American history, installed at the John M. Smyth Elementary School in Chicago. Fortunately, both of Stevenson's murals have survived; they were restored first in the late 1930s, in connection with the WPA, and then restored a second time in the late 1990s.

Gordon Stevenson mural, Construction Site (1909)

As an advanced student at the Art Institute, Stevenson was also awarded the John Quincy Adams Prize, a foreign travel stipend worth $425. This enabled him to travel to Spain and to work as an apprentice for the well-known Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, whose paintings were not unlike those of his friend, John Singer Sargent. There is a portrait of Stevenson by Sorolla dated 1917 (reproduced below), which may be the year he returned to the US.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Portrait of Gordon Stevenson (c1917)

Soon after, whatever the circumstances, Stevenson was chosen to serve in the camouflage subsection that was headed by Warner.

Further confirmation of his wartime service is in two other government photographs. In one (dated July 12, 1918), he is shown in a different room, where he and three co-workers are painting ship models. Stevenson is standing in the center background. The other artists include (left to right) sculptor John Gregory, marine painter Frederick Waugh, and theatrical scene painter Manley K. Nash.

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In another photograph, this one of the drafting room (where he and his co-workers prepared schematic instructions on how to paint the actual ships), he can barely be seen in the background. He is in the very back row in the center (looking down), directly beneath the wall clock.

On August 25, 1918, an article (BENEFIT OF BLIND SOLDIERS) in the Washington Post announced a garden party "for the benefit of the American, French and British blinded soldiers."  The decorations for the fundraising event, the article continues, "will consist of an extraordinary display of flags of all nations and of specially prepared banners painted by members of the camouflage section of the navy." Also featured will be "Gordon Stevenson, of New York, who will sketch portraits while you wait."

Camoufleurs in the drafting room

Following the war, Stevenson continued to reside in New York, where he had considerable success as an illustrator and portrait painter. Of particular note is a portrait he made of Mark Twain, which now hangs in The Players club in NYC. There are at least four other Stevenson portraits in that club's collection. His portraits of other dignitaries can also be found in the Museum of the City of New York, Rutgers University, National Academy of Design, and the Toledo Museum of Art.

Stevenson was a prolific magazine illustrators for prominent publications, notably the New York Times Book Review. He also made a series of portraits for the covers of TIME magazine (1923-24), including pencil drawings of Jack Dempsey, Herbert Hoover, Mrs. Herbert Hoover, Samuel Gompers, Ataturk, Winston Churchill, Fritz Kreisler, Roy Chapman Andrews, Joseph Conrad, Woodrow Wilson, and David Lloyd George. The list goes on—reproduced below are some.

One of those covers (as seen below) was a portrait of Homer St. Gaudens (son of the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens), who had been the officer in charge of US Army camouflage in WWI.

Speaking of camouflage, below is a marvelous portrait he made (ala Arcimboldo) for the cover of Outdoor Life magazine (August 1940). In 1948, he also illustrated a book by his father-in-law, Edward R. Hewitt (grandson of New York industrialist Peter Cooper, who founded Cooper Union), titled A Trout and Salmon Fisherman: For Seventy-Five Years (New York: Scribner's and Sons). The same family also established the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Illustration by Gordon Stevenson (c1940)

In the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there are eight portrait photographs of Gordon Stevenson, taken in 1962, which can be accessed online here.

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Since this was originally posted, I have run across an online interview of American artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, titled "On the Shoulders of Giants" and conducted in 2009 by Ira Goldberg. It is online here at LINEA: The Artist's Voice.  On page 7, Kinstler states:

The painter Gordon Stevenson, who'd taken classes with [Joaquín] Sorolla in Spain and knew [John Singer] Sargent, was another of my mentors. Gordon would drop by my studio—he was well along in years, an elegant man, who lacked fire in his belly because he didn't have to work for a living. He'd look at my work and begin his remarks with, "Now, Sargent told me that…" or, "When I was with Sorolla…"

Gordon Stevenson, portrait of Homer St. Gaudens

Aerial Photography and WWI Camouflage

The following text is a news article issued by the US Signal Corps, published as "War News" in American Photography Vol 12 (1918)—

Plans have been completed for the great enlargement of facilities for training and equipping the aerial photographic force for photographing the German trenches from the skies and keeping up to the last minute the large composite picture of the whole German front…

The bulk of the training [of the aerial photographic staff] will be for the developing and printing work which must be done on a standardized plan under process specially developed during the war, often in great haste on special motor lorries close to the front and to the staff. After a month's course, the men will be given a short advanced training and immediately sent overseas for operation in the American sector.

Aerial photography has greatly developed during the war. During the single month of September, British official reports state that 15,837 aerial photographs wee taken by the British alone. No new trench can be dug, no new communication system opened up, no new batteries placed but the ever-present and infallible camera above records it for the examination of the staff below. So piercing has been this work that camouflage has been developed as a protection, thus forcing aerial photography to even greater ingenuity.

Every sector of the front is divided into plots about half a mile square, each one numbered and entrusted to a squad of photographer who become fully familiar with it. As fast as the photographs are made, they are developed, printed, reduced or enlarged to a standard scale, and then fitted into their proper place on the large composite photograph of the sector. This work requires a large force of experts in developing, printing and enlarging, as well as in map reading interpretation.

Cases are on record where only twenty minutes have elapsed from the time a photographer snapped his camera over the German trenches until his batteries were playing upon the spot shown. In that time the airman had returned to his lines, the photograph had been developed and printed, the discovery made, and the batteries given the range and ordered to fire.

US Women's Camouflage Corps

Above Photograph of members of the Women's Camouflage Corps applying disruptive (or dazzle) camouflage to an ambulance (c1918).

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The following text is by Bessie Rowland James [journalist and wife of Marquis James], as originally published in her book For God, For Country, For Home. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1920, pp. 164-166. It has also been reprinted in Roy R. Behrens, ed., SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books, 2011, pp. 286-293.—

The Camouflage Corps was formed by a group of artists, writers, stenographers, school teachers, debutantes, many sorts of women. The Corps was not the idea [of the National League for Women's Service], but when there was the nucleus of an organization, the members asked to be put under its direction. After consulting government officials and learning that there was a real need of women camoufleurs, the League took steps to complete the organization.

Like the Motor Corps, the Camouflage Corps had its captain and lieutenants. The commander, a corporal, was Anne Furman Goldsmith, an artist. Courses were arranged under the direction of Lieutenant H. Ledyard Towle, an artist, who was at that time training the first camouflage section of the Seventy-First Regiment. Large numbers of English and French women, safe locations many miles behind the battleline, were employed in France to camouflage the big guns, wagons, trucks, to make observers'  suits, and other equipment as well as the miles of wire netting used upon the roads. It was a kind of work women could do. It required, however, much technical training.

The course given by the Camouflage Corps covered not only training in camouflage, but drilling, boxing, pistol and rifle shooting. The first Corps was formed in March [1918], and when the training was completed a second one was organized, this time under the direction of the United States Shipping Board.

Women ship camoufleurs in Washington DC (c1918) *

For the training of both Corps, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., permitted the women to utilize the old Billings Estate on the Hudson River for developing screens to match the rocks, water, and trees. Part of the estate was used as a revolver range. The camoufleurs spent much time in attempting to design an observer's suit which would harmonize with any scenery and make the wearer practically undiscernible at a distance of twenty feet.

The camouflage of the front of the suit matched the trees; the back shaded into the rocks' reversed, the front merged with the grass and the back with ice and snow. By such an arrangement the observer's suit could be used in a variety of landscapes; but the Camouflage Corps was not satisfied. It sought to design a suit useful in any terrain.

About a dozen graduates of the Corps were employed by the navy, some in Washington to work out different plans of camouflage and others in the yards at Philadelphia. Perhaps the most spectacular work of the Corps was the camouflage of the [USS] Recruit, the big land battleship built in Union Square, New York City. This was a night's work for the women and was done at the request of the navy to further recruiting. The camouflage design was worked out in the classrooms of the Corps. One day at sundown New Yorkers saw the ship a tame, neutral gray. The next morning it wore a wild, fantastic design of many colors.

Tanks, ambulances, and trucks were camouflage at the request of different branches of the Government to encourage recruiting, for wherever the camoufleurs went in their uniforms, spreading their bright paints, a crowd was sure to gather.

* The officer in the top photograph is Harold Van Buskirk, who was the executive officer in charge of the US Navy Camouflage Section during World War I.

Additional Information

More Horse Camouflage

Horse puzzle and solution

In earlier posts, we've featured camouflaged horses, notably battlefield listening posts in the form of horse carcasses that were constructed of papier mâché. We've also talked about camouflage-related puzzles that appeared in the entertainment sections of Sunday newspapers before and during World War I.

Reproduced here is a puzzle that predates adoption of the word "camouflage" but is an undoubted example of that. It was devised by a turn-of-the-century puzzle master, chess player and recreational mathematician named Sam Loyd (1841-1911). A compendium of his puzzles titled Cyclopedia of Puzzles was published in book form by his son in 1914, and is available online. It includes his "Pony Puzzle" (p. 17) in which a white pony is hidden among the various parts of a "dark horse" (looks more like a donkey to me) silhouette. Here are Loyd's instructions—

Trace an exact copy of the figure, as shown, and cut out the six pieces very carefully, and then try to arrange them together so as to make the best possible figure of a horse. That is all there is to it, but the entire world laughed for a year over the many grotesque representations of a horse which can be made with those six pieces.

Loyd's solution is shown above. It's a horse of a different color of course. We are reminded of the venerable Chinese puzzle game, the tangram (below), in which seven shapes are rearranged, and which Sam Loyd also wrote about.

Three solutions to the Chinese tangram puzzle

French Horse Camouflaged With Paint

French soldiers painting a horse (1917)

In the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, June 24, 1917, there was a lengthy article on World War I camouflage, titled A PECULIAR WAR NEED THAT AMERICA MUST FILL. In the bottom left corner of the page, there is a small, poor quality photograph of a group of people painting a horse—yes, actually applying paint to a live horse. The caption reads—

The French, who have carried the "camouflage" to further extremes than any of the warring powers, paint all conspicuously white horses khaki color to make them invisible.

There is further confirmation of this practice in Cécile Coutin's recent book, Tromper l'ennemi: L'invention du camouflage moderne en 1914-1918. On pages 114-115, she reproduces two photographs of French soldiers applying brown pigment to a white horse. One of these photographs was published on the cover of Le Petit Journal agricole (No. 1120, December 23, 1917), while the other one (shown above) was taken on the same occasion. The caption explains that the paint consists of potassium permanganate. Hmmm. One wonders what the effects would be on the well-being of the horse.

French Camouflage and Criminals

WWI French camoufleurs wearing hooded cagoule outfits

In an earlier post, we reproduced various images of French camoufleurs dressed in paint-streaked hooded outfits, the term for which was cagoule. These were adopted early in World War I by artists in the French infantry, to prevent themselves from being seen by aerial observers as they manned field artillery. Above is the cover of a French magazine (dated June 5, 1915) in which soldiers are wearing uniforms that look eerily like a mottled variation on the sinister ceremonial hoods of the American Ku Klux Klan. At the time, the French public was disturbed by this radical change of attire. This was described thirty years ago by art historian Elizabeth Louise Kahn in The Neglected Majority: "Les Camoufleurs," Art History, and World War I (University Press of America, 1984)—

Hidden beneath camouflaged cagoules…was a ghoulish image of the modern soldier, whose finely fitted and brilliant red and blue clothing was replaced by an amorphous costume of drab greens and browns that turned the individual into a frightening form.

Later on the same page, she mentions that one of the reasons for the initial disdain for camouflage was that "the very term camouflage held a devious and unseedy [sic] meaning for French readers of popular literature…" Prior to the founding of the first camouflage unit, it "was a word used to describe evil criminals who lurked about city streets and hid themselves from the police" (p. 148).

We were reminded of this when recently we ran across various images from French popular literature and film, before and during WWI, of a fictitious criminal named Fantomas. Created in 1911 by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the character was central to more than forty crime novels. The popularity of the books was amplified by various adaptations for film, television and comic books.

French crime character Fantomas

I mention this because in some of the images (such as those posted here), this crime character has an uncanny resemblance to a WWI hooded camoufleur. If Fantomas was on the minds of the French public at the outset of the war, no wonder they viewed with suspicion the cagoules (the "hoodies") of the camoufleurs.

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Camouflage Sheet Music Covers

Sheet music illustration | Albert Barbelle (1919)

Thanks to camouflage scholar Claudia Covert at the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design, we are now aware of the work of an American illustrator named Albert (Wilfred) Barbelle (1887-1957). It was Claudia who alerted us to an illustration by Barbelle of a dazzle-painted World War I ship on the cover of the music for Down the Lane and Home Again (1919), reproduced above. In the 1930s, he drew the lead character for the first Walt Disney book about Mickey Mouse. Beyond that, we've since located a sheet music cover by Barbelle (for Baby's Prayer Will Soon Be Answered (c1919)) in which he again includes a dazzle-camouflaged ship (shown here).

Sheet music illustration | Albert Barbelle (1919)

Pertinent to ship camouflage (if not to Barbelle) we have also happened upon the sheet music for a Camouflage One Step (1917), for which the illustrator was Roger de Valerio (1886-1951), a prolific French designer who created more than 2,000 sheet music covers.

As you may recall, one of our earlier posts featured yet another example of camouflage-themed sheet music for Camouflage: A Soldier's Song (1918).

Sheet music illustration | Roger de Valerio (1917)

Ship Camouflage | SS Matilda Weems

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Above Two views of a World War I dazzle-camouflaged ship, the SS Matilda Weems, as photographed on 23 August 1918. Sixth Naval District. Designs on the starboard (top) and port sides (bottom) differ remarkably. From photographs in the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Items 6925070 and 6925071.

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John Windsor, "General Patterns Army" in The Independent (August 4, 1996)—

Camouflage is the creation of aesthetes, not military tacticians. In fact, ever since the first purpose-designed camouflage of the First World War, hardened fighting men have gone into battle wearing patterns dreamed up by artists who considered them rather gorgeous.

WWI Ship Camouflaged as Island

Philip Little (c1917), battleship disguised as island

We've discovered something rather odd. It's an unusual painting in the collection of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It is undated (but presumably goes back to 1917) but bears the very clear signature of Philip Little, Salem, Mass. The most curious thing about it is foretold by its title: Battleship camouflaged as "An Island." This is followed by a note that reads: Canvas screens painted appropriately would be used, as in some foreign service. Boston Navy Yard. Zooming in on it on screen, it becomes apparent that the painting was made on the surface of a line drawing (or diagram) of an "outboard profile" of a World War I-era ship, identified as the USS Delaware, an American dreadnought battleship. Shown below is a close-up of a detail of this behemoth dressed up as an island, while above are three other views, including the entire painting, the artist's signature, and the label that's glued to the surface. Odd indeed.

Philip Little (c1917), battleship disguised as island

So who was Philip Little (1857-1942), and how and when was he involved in ship camouflage? There is no shortage of sources, online and otherwise. In the Boston Sunday Globe (September 9, 1917, p. 38), there is a news article by (Globe art critic) A.J. Philpott titled IN CAMOUFLAGE WAR MAKING DECEPTION INTO A FINE ART. It's a substantial article, near the end of which there is this note—

Philip Little, the Salem artist, who paints both landscapes and marines and who is one of the foremost painters in the country, recently experimented with camouflage on a boat with very remarkable success. It is men of his stamp who should be called on for service in this new emergency.

This may be in reference to Little's proposal (above) to disguise a battleship as an island, or it may refer instead to his other attempts at ship camouflage. In an unpublished and undated typescript by US Navy camoufleur Everett L. Warner ("Summary of Points to be Made in a General Lecture on Marine Camouflage") states that two photographs of camouflage schemes, designed by Little, were forwarded to him by the Boston Navy Yard on January 10, 1918. According to Navy records, the photographs (of the USS Yacona and the USS Aztec, both shown below) were taken on December 20, 1917. Clearly, these are not examples of island mimicry, but appear instead to fall between the "low visibility" (or optical mixture) experiments of muralist William Andrew Mackay (inspired by the findings of physicist Ogden Rood) and various "disruption" schemes.

Philip Little (1917), camouflage schemes for USS Yacona and USS Aztec

Encountering Two Dazzled Ships WWI

WWI dazzle camouflage (c1918)

It is always interesting to hear from UK ship modeler Jim Baumann who sends us links to amazing World War I ship models, as well as vintage photographs of dazzle-painted ships from the same era. Recently he shared a link to a wonderful model by Hou Wenchang of the HMT Olympic (1918). Be sure to zoom in on the detailed close-up images on the left side of the page. And above is an unusual photograph of two exquisitely-camouflaged ships, either British or American.

dazzle camouflage website

 

WWI Dazzle-Painted Cafe Buses

Camouflaged British café buses (1933)

Years ago, we ran across a news photograph (above), with a note explaining that, after World War I, unemployed British navy veterans were given jobs as servers on mobile café buses. As a reminder to the public, these buses were painted in striped ship camouflage patterns. Last week, we found a brief news article in the La Porte City (IA) Progress Review (dated June 15, 1933, p. 9) with a headline that reads CAFÉ BUSES CATER TO MOTORIST TRADE. Part of the rest of the article reads—

Traveling cafes on British roads are the latest development in catering for motorists, says Answers Magazine. A scheme for a fleet of these has been worked out as a means of providing employment for retired naval officers.

These traveling cafes are really super coffee stalls, fitted out with the most up-to-date equipment for providing refreshment for hungry wayfarers. The first of them are already on the road and may be recognized by their blue and white exteriors, in the style of the wartime "dazzle" camouflage for merchant ships. 

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Dazzle Camouflage Film Trailer

Author and designer Roy R. Behrens is interviewed in a new trailer (just posted) of Jonnie Morris' upcoming documentary on RAZZLE DAZZLE: The Hidden Story of Camouflage. The new graphics, pacing and editing are dazzling in and of themselves.

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Same Camouflage on Two Ships

Two dazzle-painted US ships (c1918) with the same camouflage

When dazzle ship camouflage was first adopted by the British Royal Navy in 1917 (and later by the US), the original plan was that no two ships should be painted with the same design. But it soon became apparent that this could never be accomplished, so a single design was often applied to multiple ships, with modifications as needed. In an earlier post, as an example of this, we featured photographs of two dazzle-painted British ships, the SS Empress Russia and the SS Osterley. Pictured above is another example, as seen in two American ships, the USS Congaree (top) and the USS Lake Borgne (bottom). According to a note made by US Navy camoufleur Everett L. Warner, the camouflage for the American ships was designed by a well-known marine painter named Frederick Judd Waugh (a student of Thomas Eakins), who is shown below in the process of painting a "victory mural" at the conclusion of World War I. Three hundred works by Waugh are in the collection of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Wichita KS.

WWI ship camoufleur Frederick J. Waugh

Waugh's Victory Mural (c1919)

Behrens Camouflage Lecture at UNLV

UNLV lecture on Monday, September 16, 2013 at 7:00 pm

Roy R. Behrens, Professor of Art (graphic design) and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, will be a guest at the Department of Art at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He will speak about "Closure and Disclosure: The Dance of Form and Function in Art and Camouflage" at 7:00 pm on Monday, September 16, 2013, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum on the UNLV campus. The event is open to the public.

Other sources

Review of Coutin Camouflage Book

Pages from the WWI notebook of André Mare (1916)

LAST APRIL IN a blog post here, we shared our excitement about a new book by French historian Cécile Countin on WWI French camouflage, titled Tromper l'ennemi: L'invention du camouflage moderne en 1914-1918 (Paris: Éditions Pierre de Taillac, 2012). We couldn't review it, as much as we wanted to, because the text is entirely in French. Nonetheless, we have greatly benefited from it because it is a rich array of French camouflage artifacts from that era, with exquisite full-color images of posters, magazine illustrations, camoufleurs' sketchbook drawings—you name it—along with scores of black-and-white wartime photographs, many of which have presumably never been published before. Reproduced above, for example, is a page spread from the notebook of French army camoufleur André Mare, showing 1916 photographs of camouflage-painted cannons.

In recent days, a review of Coutin's book has been published online. It was written by American historian E. Malcolm Parkinson (associate professor emeritus of history at Worchester Polytechnic Institute), whose article on "The Artist at War: Painters, Muralists, Sculptors, Architects Worked to Provide Camouflage for Troops in World War I" we blogged about a year ago. Now, Parkinson's review of the Coutin book can be accessed on the web at Leonardo Reviews >>more

Did Dazzle Camouflage Really Work?

Blodgett ship camouflage plans (redrawn)

WHILE LECTURING recently at the Sydney College of the Arts in Australia, I shared my digital reconstructions of a number of course deception plans for World War I ship camouflage (commonly known as dazzle camouflage). Five of those are shown above. The original study was conducted by Leo S. Blodgett, a Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering student at MIT, and the results were published in his Bachelor of Science degree thesis (1919).

This full document can be accessed here at the MIT library website. His hand-drawn colored diagrams of camouflaged ship models are somewhat imperfectly rendered, so I have redrawn them on computer. A more serious problem is that the color swatches (a key to the colors applied to the ship models) were apparently made with opaque watercolor (gouache), and some of the colors have dramatically changed with the passage of time. So the colors in my reconstructions may differ considerably from the originals. Also, as Blodgett mentions in his text, he restricted his experiments to those that made intentional use of perspective distortions or forced perspective (aka "false perspective").

Using a ship camouflage testing theatre that, at the end of the war, was given to MIT by Boston-area camouflage artists (he includes two photographs of it, reproduced below), he determined that average course estimation errors could sometimes be substantial. To date, this is the most persuasive proof that not only was dazzle camouflage effective in diverting the aim of the U-boats, it was far better than anyone thought.

Ship Camouflage Testing Theatre (c1919)

More recently, I found another document, titled Notes on Course Deception Principles. In public domain, it appears to be a US Government report [Contract NObe-72039. Task 3 (Final Report). Report No. 3-8. September 1959]. The study was conducted by MIT optical physiologist Seibert Quimby Duntley, whose emphasis on "false perspective" may suggest that he had some awareness of the research by Blodgett. Also, in the final paragraph, when he mentions automobile styling in relation to camouflage, he is probably alluding to the work of designers and color consultants at General Motors (notably H. Ledyard Towle, who was an army camoufleur during WWI). Here is the full text (there are no illustrations)—

PREFACE
These notes were originated in support of efforts to avoid course deception effects in the painting of aircraft. They constitute a brief discussion of some of the principles employed in the design of the course-deception patterns and type-deception patterns formerly incorporated in the painting of surface ships as a defense against submarine and surface ship attack directed by visual sightings. Although technical developments have eliminated these measures from naval practice, the concepts from which they were developed are not without present value. The notes are reported herein primarily because no comparable written material on this subject appears to be available.

INTRODUCTION
Several effective patterns for the painting of surface vessels were devised in World Wars I and II to decrease the probability that the true course and speed of the ship would be correctly estimated by an observer at sea level. It is the purpose of this report to discuss some of the principles upon which the design of these patterns was based.

BASIS OF COURSE ESTIMATION
Successful estimation of the course of a vessel involves a special mental process in the recognition category: When some object which might be a ship is visually perceived, the observer is required to search his memory and generate within his brain visualizations of known ship-types at various headings in order to compare these visualizations with the appearance of the object. When the correlation between the apparent object and one of these visualizations is sufficiently good the observer experiences a sense of recognition and course estimation. This mental process, usually subconscious and rapid, requires familiarity with the appearance of ships and, of course, improves with experience due to the accumulation of memory. If visualizations at more than one heading correlate closely with the appearance of the unknown object, course estimation is ambiguous; accuracy is possible only if there is a rapid rate of change of correlation between the appearance of the unknown object and a series of visualized ship headings. Any factor causing the appearance of the object to fail to correlate with visualizations based upon memory of known ships will inhibit or prevent recognition and course estimation. It is not surprising, therefore, that several types of course deception pattern techniques have been evolved. These can, however, be classified into two main groups, which might be termed confusion measures and falsification measures, respectively, for lack of more standardized terminology. These two categories will be discussed separately in the following sections.

CONFUSION MEASURES
As previously stated, any factor causing the appearance of an unknown object to fail to correlate with visualizations based upon memory of known ships will inhibit or prevent course estimation. Two classical methods for achieving confusion by means of paint have been called dazzle and low visibility, respectively.

The weird and garish dazzle designs so common on ships plying the North Atlantic during World War I have long disappeared from the seas, but pictures of them are easily available and universally excite curiously concerning the origins, the functions, and the basis for their design. All dazzle patterns sought to give the ship an unrecognizable appearance from a "periscope viewpoint." Almost any large discordant pattern departing markedly from all natural lines of a ship can accomplish this confusion objective. Each of the artists who conducted dazzle studies at model scale evolved favorite pattern-types, all of which served to produce course deception by confusion. The best of the dazzle patterns, however, sought to incorporate false perspective as a further course deception feature; perspective distortion as an independent course deception measure will be discussed in a later section.

Low visibility painting schemes for ships are still in use and are intended primarily to reduce the probability of the presence of the ship being visually detected. This is usually accomplished to some useful degree, but every low visibility treatment is a compromise and approaches true concealment within only a very narrow gamut of lighting and viewing conditions. At other times, portions of the vessel may be difficult or impossible to see, but other parts are readily visible. When this situation prevails, recognition of the ship may be impossible and its course may be difficult to estimate. The low visibility paint is then serving to provide course deception by confusion.

FALSIFICATION MEASURES
Since any factor causing the appearance of an unknown object to fail to correlate with the correct visualization of the ship being observed may lead to an erroneous course prediction, falsification of several kinds were employed in ship camouflage. Included in this category of course deception measures are disguise, false cues, false perspective, and symbolic patterns. Many ingenious falsification measures have been devised, but this report will mention only a few examples.

Disguise took many forms and was more commonly employed for reasons of type deception than course deception. False superstructure was added, for example, to tankers to make them resemble freighters, transports, or even warships, and in so doing reverse bow and stern in order to add an element of course deception.

False Cues included such devices as a bow wave painted at the stern of the ship, or a pint pattrn on or near the stack of a vessel intended to make the stack appear to learn toward the bow rather than the stern.

False Perspective was not confined to dazzle patterns. False superstructures and false water lines were employed to produce an untrue illusion of distance and to produce errors in stadiometric ranging through a periscope. False water lines tilted slight from bow to stern gave to the ship the illusion of a false heading. An analogous effect was sometimes achieved by the use of non-parallel bands of paint on the sides of vessels having multiple decks, thus inducing a false convergence relation.

Symbolic Patterns saw relatively little use in naval camouflage but they are extensively used as a type of "falsification measure" in many forms of art and design. A recent example is found in the current styling used by a certain automobile manufacturer, who says that his cars appear to be in motion even when standing still. This is achieved by an overall wedge-shaped motif high at the rear and tapering to a low point in front, suggestion of the configuration of recent high speed aircraft or of an arrow point. Arrows or chevron markings are often used to indicate direction.

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