EverettWarner

A chronology of his life, with particular emphasis on his contributions to US naval camouflage during World Wars I and II

1877 Born Everett Longley Warner on July 16, in Vinton, Iowa, where his father was a lawyer. His maternal grandfather was Stephen Return Riggs, an ardent missionary with the Dakota Sioux Native Americans, and a linguist who is credited with documenting, preserving and translating the Dakota language.

1894 After moving to Washington, DC, where his father had become an Examiner for the Bureau of Pensions, Warner attended art classes, while still in high school, at the Corcoran Museum and the Washington Art Students League.

1895 Having graduated from high school, he was hired as an art critic for The [Washington] Evening Star.

1900 After moving to New York, he studied life drawing with George Bridgeman and others at the Art Students League.

1903 Moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julien. Lived in Europe and the US off and on for the next four years, and traveled on numerous excursions to paint in such settings as the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sicily, and Gibraltar, and, in North America, to Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador.

1908 Engaged in painting landscapes of various urban settings in lower Manhattan. With these and other work in the next decade, began to win prestigious awards, including exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, Wadsworth Atheneum, Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, Dartmouth College, and St. Louis Art Museum.

1917 During the summer, he participated in experiments in trying to make a ship invisible (the USS Ockenfels), using surface and structural camouflage plans proposed by Thomas Edison. “I painted her,” Warner later recalled (as pictured here), “but it was not a success. The ‘Hawaiian skirt’ on the bow, as the longshoremen called it, was carried away before she got out of New York harbor” [from his lecture notes].

On September 29, presented his own proposals for ship camouflage to the Bureau of Construction and Repair in Washington, DC. According to government records, he argued that it is “practically impossible to make a ship invisible from a submarine, because she was almost invariably outlined against the sky and consequently would show up in silhouette. His proposal, therefore, was to break up the silhouette in such as way as to make it very difficult for the enemy to obtain the range.” Known officially as the Warner System, his method was one of six camouflage measures approved by the US government, along with others originated by George de Forest Brush (in partnership with his son Gerome Brush, and with Abbott H. Thayer), William Andrew Mackay, Lewis Herzog, Maximilian Toch and a person named Watson.

1918 Commissioned a Lieutenant in the US Naval Reserves, in order to organize and supervise a design subdivision (in Washington, DC) of a newly formed American Camouflage Section. Among his fellow camouflage designers were Frederic Waugh (marine painter), Gordon Stevenson (portrait painter), John Gregory (sculptor), Kenneth MacIntire, M. O’Connell (advertising artist), M. Nash, and a person named Richardson. Concurrently, a research subdivision was set up at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, under the direction of Lieutenant Loyd A. Jones, an optical physiologist.

During the previous year, a comparable unit had been formed at the Royal College of Art in London, under the supervision of British marine painter Norman Wilkinson, who is invariably said to have been the originator of “dazzle painting” in ship camouflage.

In March 1918, Wilkinson traveled to the US (on the USS Leviathan), to serve as a short-term advisor to the US naval camouflage team. Throughout his visit, Warner was Wilkinson’s escort as he lectured on dazzle painting at various ports. Like their British predecessors, the American camouflage artists applied disruptive patterns to miniature wooden ship models, tested the painted models in labs equipped with periscopes, and prepared detailed construction plans for painting the ships.

It was during World War I that Warner made a serendipitous discovery that (had the war continued) would have enabled him to produce new, one-of-a-kind dazzle schemes, in almost unlimited number. While conducting a seminar for dock painters on course deception, Warner cut an already dazzle-painted ship model into five or so sections. He then arranged these sections in a curved or oblique angle (see his drawing on the left) in front of a plain gray ship model. It was at that moment, he later explained, that he realized that, when the gray model "was placed at any angle behind one of those rows of blocks, it invariably appeared to take the same direction as the blocks."

In other words, he had discovered that to create a new unique dazzle pattern, one could simply position the blocks in a way that contradicted the actual orientation (the course) of the gray ship model, convert that arrangement to a flat diagram (through drawing or photography), and apply the resulting design to the ship. The astonishing effects are evident in photographs that still survive of his experiments with this method.

Everett Warner (1877-1963)

Ship Camouflage Artist

compiled by Roy R. Behrens

At right are not photographs of the blocks that Everett Warner used. His were irregular sections of dazzle-painted wooden ship models, cut into slices, and arranged in a somewhat irregular way (see ship model photos below). All I’ve done here (as a crude approximation of Warner’s method) is to cover wooden cubes with adhesive printed patterns (a), and then, ala Abbott H. Thayer, to frame a detail of that plan by superimposing on it a cut-out silhouette of a ship (b). Warner’s ingenious method, as if clear from the photographs of his models, was quite different, in the sense that he arranged the blocks in a row that stood in front of a monochrome wooden ship model.

The problem confronting a submarine, once his prey has been sighted, resolves itself solely into estimating course and speed of the target, in order to determine how the approach to torpedo fire position should be made. The “dazzle” system of painting is based on this one consideration and that is, of rendering the problem confronting a submarine more difficult, confusing him as to how his approach shall be made and thereby adding in some degree to the safety of the vessel attacked.

U.S. Admiral William S. Sims (1917)

Above are pencil drawings by Warner that were part of the draft of a manual he wrote for the US Navy on ship camouflage, based on his experiences in World Wars I and II. This document still exists as a typescript (having survived a fire that destroyed his studio) but the government handbook was never issued. These are his drawings of the cut-up blocks that he used in inventing new disruptive camouflage patterns.

Above Simple demonstration by Thayer from his book on Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909/18) , showing that even brightly colored butterflies are more difficult to “read” (as a coherent, continuous shape) than are those in a single color. He went on to argue against the use of monochrome khaki (sand-colored) for field service uniforms.

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Many of the actual wooden models constructed by Warner’s camouflage team during WWI were later destroyed by a fire in his painting studio. Above is one of the few that survived. To see others, click here.

USS Ockenfels in camouflage, based on Thomas Edison’s plan (1917) [see comment by Warner at far left]

1918-19 Following WWI, Warner returned to landscape painting and renewed his earlier affiliation with the Lyme Art Colony, one of the best-known artist colonies of the time, located on the mansion grounds of the estate of Florence Griswold at Old Lyme, Connecticut. That colony flourished from 1899 to 1937, and was initially referred to as the center for an American branch of the Barbizon School and, later, the Impressionists. During this period, he lectured and wrote about marine camouflage, and completed a series of aerial view paintings, made from an airplane.

1923 At age 46, Warner married Katharine Jordan Thomas. During their marriage, they raised three sons, Stephen, James and Thomas.

1924 He moved with his wife to Pittsburgh, where he accepted an art teaching position at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His department head was Homer Saint-Gaudens, whose father was the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and who had served in WWI as the head of the US Army Camouflage Corps.

1941 In December, when the US entered World War II, Warner took leave from Carnegie in order to resume his role as Chief Civilian Aid in charge of camouflaging ships for the US Navy.

Above One of the earliest ship camouflage proposals was that of American artists Abbott H. Thayer and George de Forest Brush. These are two of their drawings for US Patent No. 715,013, filed in 1910, in which a ship is countershaded in a manner that is similar to the coloration of a seagull. Brush’s son, Gerome Brush, worked with Thayer in submitting other ideas before and during World War I.

Above Everett Warner, in a photograph probably taken in the years between the World Wars, while he was a teacher at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

1945 At the war’s end, Warner was discharged from the Navy. At age 68, he then retired from teaching, and settled with his family in Westmoreland, New Hampshire.

1963 Everett Warner died of a heart attack on October 20, at age 86.

1972 Warner’s studio was destroyed in a major fire, resulting in the loss of many of his drawings, paintings, letters, notes and ship models.

• • •

Above Five ship camouflage co-workers, in the early years of World War II, including (in the foreground) Robert R. Hays, and (in the background) Bennet Buck (center, in uniform, mistakenly listed earlier as Everett Warner), William Walters (on left, facing away), Arthur Conrad (at rear desk, in suit and tie) and one other person. They are shown painting ship models, and transferring those patterns to blueprints of each class of ship. At right is Robert R. Hays, painting ship models. Throughout the rest of this web page are government photographs of ships whose camouflage was designed by Warner’s team during WWI.

Above In this government photograph (courtesy of Robert R. Hays), Everett Warner is surround by WWII American naval camouflage team, including (left to right) Bennet Buck, Sheffield Kagy, William Walters, Warner (holding ship model), Arthur Conrad, and Robert R. Hays.

Everett

Warner

[Abbott H.] Thayer’s contribution to marine camouflage was wholly inspirational. His ideas as far as he had formulated them, were wholly impractical, but he was never given the change to work on ships and learn what was practical and what was not. Thayer’s model painted to represent a cloud on the distant horizon, would have involved covering the ship with a vast spread of canvas, and apart from the great cost and labor involved, it would have hampered the ship’s operation. It was however no more visionary than Thomas Edison’s scheme involving a big spread of canvas. But Edison was an inventor, so they let him try out his idea, and a very wild idea it turned out to be. I know because I had the job of doing the painting work on the vessel. Part of the added camouflage structural work was so unseaworthy that it got carried away before the vessel got out of New York harbor.

Everett Warner, in a statement published in Nelson C. White, Abbott H. Thayer (Hartford CT: Connecticut Printers, 1951), p. 138.