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ABSTRACT many in a lengthy historic tradition. Like other of visual one simplyamuse was he originator; its hardly was he ground, known asbeen reversible figure-ground. long has phenomenon this psychology, In it. behind rizon distantho- a transparent,oroutwith cut either plantis the which sky and clouds appear. In a painting of a potted plant, above the ocean, seems at the same time to flying be bird,a hole a through of shape the paintings, his of one In ground. seem to be a cutout silhouette through which we see a back- his paintings, in which a foreground figurecan just aseasily “punch with expectations deflate they always, Nearly surprise. by us take inevitably Magritte’spaintings in images the pun-like and jokes because only if comment, unwarranted an not is It [1]. jokes” like “structured been having as de scribed are Magritte René surrealist Belgian of paintings the As I write this, a news article has recently appeared in which gaps inimageswith“content-aware”digitalpatches. of it,andcomparesittocurrentcomputer-basedpracticesreplacing This essayrevisitsthatconcept,Thayer’s descriptionsanddemonstrations seem asifonecould“seethrough”them,theyweretransparent. ontheirbodiesmakeit contention that,inmanyanimals,thepatterns a kindofcamouflagethathecalled“background-picturing.”Itwashis working withhisson,GeraldH.Thayer(1883–1939),hypothesized AbbottH.Thayer(1849–1921), coloration innature,artist-naturalist In thefirstdecadeoftwentiethcentury, whileresearchingprotective Seeing through Camouflage g ©2018 ISAST Frontispiece.Article then filledinbythesoftware,usingattributes suppliedbythebackground. the background.In(d),emptyfigureof thebirdin(c)hasbeenselected, Adobe Photoshop,whilein(c),thebirdhas beenremoved,leavingonly Coloration (1909).In(b),thebackground hasbeendigitallyremoved,using original ofwhichwasreproducedasPlate II,facingp.38,inConcealing Thayer’s watercolorpaintingofaMaleRuffed GrouseinForest(a),the with this issue. this with
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- - animals are “a sort of compound picture of their normal normal their of picture compound of sort “a are animals mal’s usual haunts. In Thayer’s words,the patterns found on n reasoned,anitaverageis rangege-ofa a settings, of typical he counterproductive. Instead, single be would That a background. of image that pictorial literal suggesting a is not pattern animal’s was an Thayer and another, to setting through it ifit were transparent” [3]. seen be would as background such of “apictureare bodies their on patterns the it, put he As habitat. customary their for suited well being toward evolved had animals of ance picturingWith. appearcontendedconcept,thathe the that called camouflage of kind new a espouse to HandersonThayer (1883–1939), somepoint at Thayer began shapes) [2]. and colors discordant combining by apart broken is figure and mechanism) survival tive adap- an as doubts about had Thayer himself which things, settings), of investigations his by followed was that insight an oration), col- animal in effects shading invertedfor accounts (which of camouflagename popular the acquire to (soon nature in oration” “concealingof colresearch- his in it used who (1849–1921), Thayer Handerson Abbott naturalist, and an artist by American use serious more to put was it when century, tieth his horrific assassin, John Booth. Wilkes becomes suddenly,trees the between backgroundspace the horseback, rides through a benign grove of trees—and then, on Lincoln, another, Abraham In exile. in Napoleon of file pro the becomes trees the between space the attention, of switch a by then, and Elba, of island the on trees of image nineteenth the century, atwhat be seems an firstwe view to from example one In art. in use its before long games and ments, reversible figure-ground was used in lowbrow puzzles eric abstracted equivalent of the appearance(s) of the ani- the appearance(s)of the ofequivalent abstracted eric But animals are rarely immobile. They move from one one from move They immobile. rarely are animals But Incollaboration andartistnaturalist son,his with Gerald Thissame device resurfaced atthe beginning ofthe twen - background matchingbackground mimicry mimicry ). Thayer’s initial discovery was was discovery Thayer’sinitial ). (the confusing resemblance of different different of resemblance confusing (the 08 41 LEONARDO, Vol. 51, No.1,pp.40–46, 2018 (the blending of shapes with their their with shapes of blending (the (in which a which (in disruptionfigure countershading background- - -
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Fig. 1. An example of background-picturing, as shown in a Thayer drawing of a bird as viewed against a “uniformly patterned horizontal ground plane,” from Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), facing p. 32. Public domain.
backgrounds—a picture seemingly made up by the averag- ing of innumerable landscapes” [4]. b Abbott Thayer is often described as eccentric. Even his Fig. 2. Two views of a painting (by Abbott Thayer, Gerald Thayer and son, who was also unconventional, referred to his father as Rockwell Kent) of a copperhead snake in a setting of leaves on a forest floor. In Fig. 2a, the entire painting is visible, but the snake is difficult to find. In an “extreme believer” (although not until after his father’s de- Fig. 2b, a blank page, from which the snake’s silhouette has been cut out, mise) [5]. Thayer’s assertions on camouflage were lampooned is superimposed on the painting, making the snake clearly visible. From in public by the naturalist, author and statesman Theodore Concealing Coloration (1909). Plate XI, facing p. 172. Public domain. Roosevelt, the former U.S. President, who had recently come back from a grandiose African wildlife hunt. Thayer’s ideas, Roosevelt claimed, were “nonsensical” and absurd, the fail- background of decaying leaves on the forest floor [8]. Aided ing of “a certain type of artistic temperament” [6]. Given by artistic license somewhat, the snake and the ground so ex- that tenor, it would be hard to overestimate the skepticism pertly match that it is nearly impossible to distinguish the one with which background-picturing (an especially challeng- from the other (Fig. 2a). That is Stage 1 in this “proof” of the ing concept) was received in Thayer’s lifetime by scientists, wondrous effectiveness of background-picturing. But then naturalists—and anyone else possessed of (nonartistic) com- Stage 2 is introduced, which simply consists of a full-page mon sense. overlay, devoid of printing, but out of which has been excised In support of background-picturing, the Thayers’ stron- a precisely cutout silhouette of the copperhead snake. When gest evidence was presented in their famous book, Concealing superimposed, the overlay blocks out the background—and Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (first published in 1909, reveals the now conspicuous snake (Fig. 2b). then reissued in 1918). Among their illustrations of back- Concealing Coloration was sufficiently well received that ground-picturing is a drawing of a bird within the woodland the Thayers were motivated to develop a series of camou- setting of a “uniformly patterned horizontal ground plane,” as flage demonstrations, of which they made multiple copies. viewed by an observer who is looking slightly downward [7] While these were initially devised to show how countershad- (Fig. 1). In this example, their intention was to demonstrate ing works, Thayer carried some of these with him when he how an animal’s markings can abstractly yet persuasively traveled to Europe to lecture at museums and universities, rhyme with the perspective gradient of the background. each time leaving one behind for use as a permanent public While researching animal camouflage, the Thayers came display. Later, when his research expanded to include both up with the clever device of using a superimposed cutout military and natural camouflage, a wider range of models (a stencil of sorts) on paintings of figures on backgrounds. were made. The Thayers then exhibited these in art galleries In their book, the most famous example of this is a painting and museums, in the manner that art is commonly shown. of a snake, based on an actual copperhead snake that was It is uncertain how many of these setups have been pre- borrowed from the Bronx Zoo. Collaboratively painted by served, but we do know what some of them looked like, both Thayers and by Rockwell Kent (Abbott Thayer’s stu- because they were reproduced in news articles (Fig. 3). In dent at the time), it shows the camouflaged serpent against a 1918, for example, a selection of these were exhibited at the
42 Behrens, Seeing through Camouflage
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_01337 by guest on 26 September 2021 Knoedler and Company art gallery in New York and, after “sleights” as unworthy of Thayer’s capabilities. This view is that, at the Fifth Avenue home of Cornelius and Sophia Van- clearly stated in a diary entry by Harvard botanist Oakes derbilt, as a fundraiser for the Red Cross [9]. But they were Ames, dated 18 June 1915, in which, having visited Thayer shown at other locations as well, including the Boston Mu- at his home in Dublin, NH, he recalls the artist’s studio as seum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. filled with signs of work done on natural history subjects, Some of these were variations on the trick that had been and devoid of those charming works of art which one as- used earlier for the copperhead snake. These were essentially sociates with the name of Abbott Thayer. A landscape made paintings, elaborately framed, but with some means of cover- entirely of birds’ feathers only saddened me, and a very ing them with a panel from which a silhouette had been cut. elaborate oil sketch, which revealed warblers in a thicket One is a painting of a wood duck, the second stage of which when covered with a stencil, gave me a distinct feeling of consists of a superimposed silhouette (Fig. 4a), while another melancholy [11]. makes the same point with a painting of a snipe (Fig. 4b). The third, more ambitious example is one in which the silhouette There is a cache of Thayer artifacts at the Smithsonian is part of a hinged panel that, when raised, reveals a paint- American Art Museum that confirms the extent of his inter- ing of two warblers surrounded by foliage (when lowered, it est in cutout silhouettes. One of his copperplate stencils sur- conceals the background) (Fig. 4c). As it turns out, one of vives, with the warbler’s silhouette excised. In a study folder the birds has actually been painted on that outer surface (as for Concealing Coloration, there are sketchbook images of well as again in the painting) while the other is only visible ducks, woodpeckers, zebras, antelope, beetles, butterflies, through the cutout silhouette. war-painted “savages” and military snipers, some of which This exhibit at the Vanderbilt home included other arti- are painted in watercolor, while others were constructed by facts as well. There are admiring news accounts of a piece by gluing cutout paper silhouettes on top of small collages of Thayer depicting “a large landscape scene in the Himalaya photographic details [12]. Mountains composed entirely with the plumage of a Monal pheasant,” in which not paint but scraps of feathers were used to “perfectly reproduce his [the pheasant’s] habitat” [10]. Not everyone was awed by these, in part because they saw such
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Fig. 3. This composite newspaper illustration shows some of the Thayer Fig. 4. Contemporaneous photographs of three Thayer demonstrations material that was exhibited at the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt. From The [NY] (using cutout silhouettes), as reproduced in American popular magazines Evening Herald (Daily Magazine Section) (25 May 1918) p. 1. Public domain. in 1918 and 1919. Public domain.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_01337 by guest on 26 September 2021 Discovered and exhibited in recent years are re- lated demonstrations of the visibility of military field service uniforms. These pertain to Thayer’s wartime effort to persuade the British military that khaki- colored uniforms are ineffective camouflage. Thayer argued that such clothing—while subdued and con- sistently colored (like a ship adorned in battleship gray)—does not lessen the visibility of a soldier, but rather enhances the shading effects of the sun, which makes the soldier more discernible. He believed it would be better if field uniforms were broken up by contrasting patterns. To demonstrate this, he made paper cutouts of soldiers, to which he applied dis- ruptive patterns, and placed them in various settings that resembled dioramas [13] (Fig. 5). Prior to World War I, the Thayers had realized the usefulness of looking at backgrounds by way of cutout silhouettes. In their book in 1909, this was applied only to the copperhead snake, but in later publications they showed how it can be easily used to “find” an appropriate camouflage for any creature— including a foot soldier—simply by viewing a figure’s customary surroundings (from the point of view of its predator) through a cutout. Anyone can design their own camouflage, wrote Abbott Thayer in 1918, since a person “has only to cut out a stencil of the soldier, ship, cannon or whatever figure he wishes to conceal, and look through this stencil from the viewpoint under consideration, to learn just what costume from that viewpoint would most tend to conceal this figure” [14]. There are few indications that Thayer’s proposal for high-difference patterns on uniforms or his use of silhouette cutouts were taken seriously during World War I. The U.S. was late in entering the war, Fig. 5. One of many experiments by Abbott Thayer showing how a cutout silhouette (on the right) of any figure (in this case, one that Thayer termed a “tattooed warrior”) and when the war ended, there was little, if any, im- could be used as a camouflage “finder” by superimposing it on an appropriate back- mediate need for further camouflage research. In ground photograph. As reproduced in Thayer [3] pp. 488–489. Public domain. addition, Thayer’s mental and physical health had begun to lapse dramatically. He was soon disabled by a stroke and died in 1921. Gerald Thayer continued their mand on computers [16]. In drafting this article, it occurred research for a few years, but he too was eventually overcome to me that he may also have anticipated another digital prac- by various personal issues and died in 1939. tice, as suggested by background-picturing. This can best be During World War II, the research by the Thayers on understood by looking at a series of illustrations. background-picturing and the use of silhouette cutouts re- The first of these illustrations is an unaltered reproduc- surfaced in experiments with infantry camouflage in Austra- tion of a watercolor painting by Gerald Thayer, titled Male lia. As shown by camouflage scholar Ann Elias, the person in Ruffed Grouse in Forest (Article Frontispiece, upper left). First charge of those efforts was a British-born zoologist named published in full-color in 1909 in Concealing Coloration in William Dakin. Without any credit to Thayer, Dakin and his the Animal Kingdom, it is a masterful demonstration of the colleagues made demonstrations of countershading (using intricacies of background-picturing, or (figuratively speak- fabricated bird models, just as Thayer had earlier) and set ing) of “seeing through” an animal as if it were transparent. In up silhouette cutouts of soldiers through which they could the next two illustrations, the woodland setting and the bird, isolate the bushland setting in which they were stationed, to respectively (Article Frontispiece, upper right and lower left), determine which camouflage patterns were best [15]. have been selected and removed, using Adobe Photoshop. Years ago, I published an article in Leonardo in which I In the final stage (Article Frontispiece, lower right), I have suggested that Abbott Thayer had anticipated a computer- instructed the software to fill the empty silhouette of the bird, based method of working on multiple solutions to the same using a setting of “content-aware,” based on information in art or design composition, by which we use the Save As com- the shapes and colors in the background. The result is surely
44 Behrens, Seeing through Camouflage
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_01337 by guest on 26 September 2021 successful, albeit less than equivalent to what the Thayers own hard-fought conclusions. “Oh Louis!” Abbott Thayer intended, since the source of this solution is a single particu- implores in a letter, “won’t you try once making a background lar background and not, as they hypothesized, an average of wholly out of the bird’s colors [?]” [19], while, in another let- “innumerable landscapes.” ter, Gerald Thayer openly accuses his old friend Fuertes of a By the 1920s, Abbott and Gerald Thayer had given a siz- “timidity about going the whole hog in the matter of conceal- able part of their lives to the frustrating and largely thank- ing coloration,” which was, after all, a resounding scientific less pursuit of the elusive workings of protective coloration. truth—not just “a Thayer hobby” [20]. The extent of their passion for camouflage is evidenced by Long after the death of her father, Mary Fuertes Boynton the letters they wrote to their close friend (a devoted former published the letters that he had received from Abbott and student), the naturalist and bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Gerald Thayer, along with her own speculations about why During the period 1914–1920 or thereabouts, Fuertes was liv- her father—who believed in the plausibility of background- ing in Ithaca, NY, where he was supporting his family as a picturing and was not in the least disloyal to his old teacher— bird illustrator, working for National Geographic and other chose instead to portray animals as clearly visible figures. She natural history publishers [17]. writes: “Gerald’s ruffed grouse in the Concealing Coloration In contrast to the teachings of Abbott Thayer, Fuertes’s book is a wonderful work of art, perhaps greater than any- publishers pressured him to either suppress or completely thing Louis ever did. [But] He took six months to paint it omit the habitats of the creatures in his paintings (they in- (he painted very few pictures in all), and he never made the sisted that there be no more than “a dash of environment”) adjustment to the world that would insure [sic] a normal [18]. After all, their readers were mostly interested in iden- means of earning a living for his family. The advice he gave tifying the birds themselves, without the confusion of back- Louis was good, but Louis could not take it and live.” She grounds. When the Thayers saw the published results, they continues to say that, in stark contrast, Abbott Thayer “made were terribly dismayed, and the ailing, elder Thayer (who an Eden for his children that was not of this world, worldly, could be paranoid at times) regarded it as a denial of his yet he left them ill equipped to live” [21,22].
References and Notes 9 For a newspaper account of these demonstrations, see W.B. John- stone, “Camouflage First Studied from Nature Herself by American 1 C. Skelton, “Why Magritte Was Like a Stand-Up Comedian,” The Painter,” in the (New York) Evening Herald (Daily Magazine Sec- Guardian (23 February 2015):
Behrens, Seeing through Camouflage 45
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46 Behrens, Seeing through Camouflage
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