Camoufleur F.M. Watson Has Now Been Identified

US Ship Camoufleur Frank M. Watson (1928)

As explained in a couple of earlier posts, for years we have been trying to find the full name and identity of a World War I ship camouflage designer, nearly always cited as F.M. Watson, Chief Painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard.

At last, through the research efforts of Cathy Hyman of South Carolina, we have finally found our man. He was Frank Morris Watson, Sr. (1879-1966), from Portsmouth VA. Here is more about his life—

Frank Morris Watson, Sr. was born in Philadelphia PA on October 21, 1879 [in an earlier version of this posting, we listed his birth year as 1880, but it now appears to have been a year earlier). In the census for 1910, he listed his occupation as "house painter," but during World War I (possibly earlier), he was employed as Master Painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth VA. He listed the same occupation in 1941 or 1942, when he was 61 years old.

In the March 22, 1928, issue of The Times Herald (Port Huron MI), he was featured in a photograph (as shown above), holding an artist’s palette and mahlstick, standing beside a life-sized, full-figure painting of Christ. The caption below the photograph reads—

Thirteen weeks of painting in his spare time resulted in this nine-foot painting of Jesus Christ by Frank M. Watson, of Portsmouth, Va. Watson is shown with the painting which he presented to a Portsmouth church. He is not a professional painter (p. 11).

A decade earlier, while employed at the Norfolk Navy Yard, he designed a number of posters, fourteen of which have survived (although badly faded) and are posted on the website of the North Carolina Digital Collections. It appears they were used for the purpose of raising funds for the war through Liberty Loan subscriptions from Navy Yard employees. They are signed F.M.W. Navy Yard Norfolk VA.

In US Navy history, Frank M. Watson (who, until recently, had not been clearly identified and was cited in government records as “Watson”) was known only as the designer of what was commonly called the Watson-Norfolk System for ship camouflage (c1917). It consisted of two distinctly different patterns, one for each side of the ship. For a trial period, these were applied to two American ships, the USS Anniston (formerly the USS Montgomery), and the USS Nebraska.

Watson-Norfolk System (two sides of same ship)

There are no full-color photographs of these ships (color photography, as we know it, had not yet been perfected), but there are detailed black and white photographs that show why Watson’s camouflage plans were among the most unusual. They are made of boldly-colored zigzag shapes (on the port side) and abstract rainbow patterns (on the starboard), both of which make use of perspective illusions. Watson’s scheme plan was approved for use on merchant ships (along with five other proposals) but was soon replaced by another approach.

Additional photographs of ships that have been painted with the Watson-Norfolk camouflage plan are reproduced below, as is the gravestone of Frank M. and Gertrude A. Watson, at Greenlawn Memorial Gardens, Chesapeake City, VA.

He died in Portsmouth VA on April 28, 1966.

Note A slightly different version of this text has been provided to askART.com.

Watson-Norfolk Camouflage Scheme | F.M. Watson

USS Anniston (aka USS Montgomery)

One of the earliest, most informative publications about modern American ship camouflage was a two-part magazine article in the US Naval Institute Proceedings, in July 1971 and February 1972. Both articles were titled "Ship Camouflage: Deceptive Art," the first one dealing with World War I, the second with World War II. The texts were written by Robert F. Sumrall (the curator then of ship models at the US Naval Academy Museum), and were greatly enriched by photographs, charts and drawings from his collection. more>>>

Surely, anyone who saw Sumrall's initial article was especially taken aback by photographs of two ships, USS Anniston (formerly the USS Montgomery) and the USS Nebraska. Both ships had been painted with a strange experimental design called the Watson-Norfolk scheme. It was called that because it had been proposed by F.M. Watson, who was the chief ship painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard. We blogged about this once before, when we featured a replica of one of the ships, by model-builder Wolfgang Kring.

Shown above are photographs not of the USS Nebraska but of the USS Anniston. Apparently they were the only two ships to which this pattern was applied (c1917). In both cases, as these photographs show, the left or port side of the ship was painted in a geometric zigzag plan, while the right or starboard side had a strikingly different pattern of multi-colored target forms.

There remains the mystery of just who F.M. Watson was. He may have had connections with North Carolina, since the only online works we've found are on the website of the North Carolina Digital Collections, which has 14 wartime posters signed by Watson. If so, it may be relevant that there is a grave for F.M. Watson (no name, only initials again) in the Elmwood Cemetery in Fremont NC. His dates are listed on the tombstone as 1877-1938, a typical time span for a WWI veteran. [We have since determined that the camoufleur and poster designer who was the chief ship painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard was Frank M[orris] Watson, Sr. (1880-1966) from Portsmouth VA, not F.M. Watson from Fremont NC.] more>>>


The Watson posters in the NC collection are in dreadful shape, for the simple reason that they were (apparently) published not on a printing press, but through a blueprint process, which is notoriously impermanent. I have cleaned up one of those (in brown coloration, not blue), in an attempt to strengthen its contrast. The result is below.

Poster by F.M. Watson (c1918)

By artistic standards, Watson's Over the Top: Third Liberty Loan poster is the best of his posters. The others are blueprints and somewhat clearer to read, but the drawn images, hand lettering and page layouts are amateur. Whatever the circumstances that enabled him to design the camouflage for a ship, the naiveté of his posters suggests that he was either untrained or not very capable as a professional designer. This is also reinforced by his amateur method of signing his name (shown below).

Camouflaged Nebraska | Wolfgang Kring

USS Nebraska in Watson-Norfolk camouflage (1918)

Above World War I photograph of the USS Nebraska (1918), painted in an experimental camouflage scheme proposed by an American poster artist named F.M. Watson, who was the chief ship painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Norfolk VA.• In government documents, this system was referred to as the Watson-Norfolk plan. Photo Naval History and Heritage Command (NH 101208).

In recent years, as shown in the photos below, a German ship modeler named Wolfgang Kring has produced an amazing replica of the same strangely-painted ship.

Model of camouflaged USS Nebraska © Wolfgang Kring

• Several WWI posters by Watson are listed and described on the website for the Finding Aid of the WWI Poster Collection in the State Archives of North Carolina. Each time, he is cited as "F.M. Watson, Navy Yard Norfolk."

.....

Heber Blankenhorn, Adventures in Propaganda: Letters from an Intelligence Officer in France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919, p. 3—

It's odd how childish and unbelievable camouflage makes the war seem. It makes it all look like the insane jest of the feeble-minded or a kid's toy. Man's war playthings—childish, ridiculous!

Finally, the convoying destroyers have come, tearing up out of a foggy, rainy, menacing deep—with terrific speed and bringing great comfort, but still looking like jokes—painted, restless insects.

French Maritime Museum Exhibit | Installation Views

Views of dazzle exhibition in Brest, France (2018)

In an earlier post, we featured an Australian cruise boat that had been dazzle-painted by artist Katy Mutton. Launched in October 2016, it operated on Lake Burley Griffin (Canberra, Australia) for twelve months. Since then, Katy Mutton has moved on to other challenges. Most recently, as shown in the photos in her news update (above), she visited the Musée national de la Marine in Brest, France, to see the on-going exhibit about World War I ship camouflage.

Note in particular the photo at the bottom left, which shows an exquisite model of the port side of an eccentric camouflage scheme designed by Frank M. Watson, called the Watson-Norfolk System (c1917).

Camouflage Artist | Gerome Brush

Sherry Fry, Portrait Bust of Gerome Brush (c1910)

Gerome Brush (informally referred to as “Gerry” or “Jerry”) was born in New York on March 11, 1888. His father was a well-known American painter, George de Forest Brush, while his mother, Mittie Taylor Brush, was a sculptor, inventor and pioneering aviator. He is sometimes mistakenly cited as “Jerome” Brush, but his actual name was Gerome, a tribute to French painter Jean-Léon Gérome, his father’s famous teacher at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts. 

Much of what is known about Brush and his family members, as well as others who were part of the artists colony in Dublin, New Hamphire (where the family spent their summers), is due to the efforts of his sister, Nancy Douglas Bowditch (née Nancy Brush), who wrote a memoir of her father, titled George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter (1970). Later, she also donated her papers to the Archives of American Art, including two interviews in which she talked at length about her parents, her siblings, friends and others. 

Gerome Brush learned about painting and sculpture from his father, and by working with others in Europe and the US. Among his early influences was the painter Abbott Handerson Thayer, who was a lifelong friend of his father, as well as their neighbor in Dublin. Although somewhat younger, Gerome was in close contact with other young artists who studied and lived in the vicinity of Dublin, Keene and Cornish (location of the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens), New Hampshire, among them muralist Barry Faulkner, sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry, and painter-naturalist Gerald Thayer (Abbott Thayer’s son). Bird artist and naturalist Louis Agassiz Fuertes (a Thayer student and devotee) was a frequent and favorite visitor to the Brush family’s summer home. 

In Dublin, among the Brushes’ neighbors was Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), whose youngest daughter Jean was prone to terrible seizures. Among Jean Clemens’ closest friends was Nancy Brush, and entries from Jean’s diary from 1906 confirm her romantic interest in Gerome Brush. But nothing came of it, and three years later, while no longer living in Dublin, Jean died, apparently during a seizure, while taking a bath. 

In the early 1890s, Abbott Thayer had begun to write about the survival advantage of protective coloration (or animal camouflage), and in 1898, coincident with the Spanish-American War, he and George de Forest Brush approached the US Navy with a proposal for camouflaging ships. Apparently precocious, the young Gerome Brush was also involved in this research, and in 1902, at the age of only fourteen, he and Abbott Thayer were jointly granted a patent for a “Process of Treating the Outside of Ships, etc., For Making Them Less Visible” (U.S. Patent No. 715013). The Spanish-American War having ended in 1898, the same year it began, there was no on-going conflict, and camouflage was not an urgent concern. 

In 1913, Gerome Brush married a New York actress named Louise Seymour. According to his sister Nancy, Gerome “who was beginning to make a name for himself as a sculptor, had also become interested in working at a settlement house there [in New York]—coaching boys in a dramatic club—and thus he met Louise, who was occupied in the same work.” In celebration of the marriage, Gerome’s parents took the newlywed couple and the Brushes’ several daughters (with the exception of Nancy) to Europe for an extended visit, and particularly to Florence, Italy. They left in November 1913 and lived overseas for nearly a year, but they had to return to the US in October 1914, because of the increasing dangers of World War I. 

On their return voyage, among their fellow passengers (according to Nancy Brush) “were Enrico Caruso and some of the Metropolitan Opera Company. They were full of fun and kept all the others so entertained that they didn’t have time to think about the danger [of being attacked]. They sang and played tricks on each other and had games together like so many gay children. One day Mother [Mittie Taylor Brush] looked up in surprise at her cabin window to see peering in at her the beaming face of Caruso with a lady’s hat on.

The following month, the New York Times reported that the great Caruso had dropped in at the Knoedler Galleries, to purchase an exquisite portrait that Gerome Brush had painted of his beautiful wife Louise. 

It was not until 1917 that the US entered World War I, joining the side of the Allies. Given the astonishing success with which British ships were being sunk by German submarines (called U-boats), the question of making Allied merchant ships less visible (or at least harder to target) became a paramount issue. American artists and others were encouraged to submit proposals for ship camouflage, and Gerome Brush was among those who responded.

Gerome Brush camouflage plan (not based on countershading)

In late 1917, the US Navy (working with the US Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation) officially gave its approval to six ship camouflage systems, named after their originators, including (artists) Gerome Brush, William Andrew MacKay, Lewis Herzog, Everett L. Warner, F.M. Watson, and (chemist) Maximillian Toch. For the rest of the war, according to Nancy Brush, her brother Gerome (along with other artists) was involved in supervising “the painting of merchant ships all along the eastern seaboard. He worked at Norfolk, Virginia, Boston Harbor, New York Harbor, and many other places. He trained men to do the painting according to Mr. [Abbott] Thayer’s theory [of countershading, in which] the color scheme for the ships was taken from the general coloring of a seagull, worked in two shades of gray and pure white, the underpart of everything being white.” 

In 1919, Gerome Brush was granted a second patent for ship camouflage, titled “System for Reducing the Visibility of Objects” (US Patent No. 1296753). His interest in camouflage evidently continued after the war, or perhaps it was rekindled by World War II, because in 1943, he was granted a third patent related to ship camouflage, titled “Method for Preventing Wake Formation” (US Patent 2414632). 

After WWI, Brush’s career as an artist can only have declined. Surely, his artwork (like that of his pre-Modern parents and friends) was all but dismissed as outmoded. As his parents aged, Gerome and his wife made increased visits to their home, in part because Louise was preparing a book about his father’s life. Unfortunately, in 1937, his father’s studio, artworks, papers and other irreplaceable artifacts (including Louise’s manuscript) were destroyed in a fire. 

Eventually, Gerome and Louise Brush moved away from Dublin (although their gravestones are located there) and settled in Brookline, Massachusetts. He appears to have painted portraits, sculpted portrait busts, and created murals for the Children’s Hospital in Boston. In the 1930s, he made detailed charcoal portraits of 109 members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1936, these were published as a book, titled The Boston Symphony Orchestra: Charcoal Drawings of Its Members with Biographical Sketches. In a foreword by Edward Weeks, his process is described as follows: “Each musician sat for him in the little room that houses the Casadesus Collection [of historic musical instruments]; each played for him a solo in order to banish the last vestige of self-consciousness, and from each he has drawn comments, bits of personal history, and the gleam of aspirations which are characteristic.” 

Gerome Brush died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on September 13, 1954.

Sources

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

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

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

Bowditch, Nancy Douglas, George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter. Peterborough, New Hampshire: William L. Bauhan, 1970.

Brush, Gerome, The Boston Symphony Orchestra: Charcoal Drawings of Its Members with Biographical Sketches. Boston: Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1936.

“Caruso Buys Painting” in New York Times. November 25, 1914.

“Gerome Brush” (obituary) in New York Times. September 15, 1954, p. 33.

Lystra, Karen, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

© Roy R. Behrens

book sources & historic prints & photographs