Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2009) 364, 497–501
doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0250
Published online 10 November 2008
Revisiting Abbott Thayer: non-scientific reflections
about camouflage in art, war and zoology
Roy R. Behrens*
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, USA
This paper reviews the achievements of Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921), an American
painter and naturalist whose pioneering writings on animal camouflage addressed shared concerns
among artists, zoologists and military tacticians. It discusses his beliefs about camouflage (both
natural and military) in the context of his training as an artist, with particular emphasis on three of
his major ideas: countershading, ruptive (or disruptive) coloration and background picturing.
Keywords: Abbott H. Thayer; camouflage; countershading; disruptive coloration;
background picturing
1. THAYER’S INFLUENCE
Among my most valued possessions are four letters
from Sir Alister Hardy, the eminent British marine
biologist, the first one written in 1976 and the last one
5 years later. As a young professor of art, I was
researching camouflage, and having read Hardy’s
remarkable book, The Living Stream (Hardy 1965),
I had written to him, asking about his experiences as
a military camouflage officer.
In 1914, it had been Hardy’s intention to enter
Oxford University but he chose instead to volunteer for
the British Army. In time, he was assigned to serve as a
camouflage officer, or what was called a ‘camoufleur’.
His father was an architect, so, as he explained to me,
throughout his life, he had been
There is no way to know for sure how many aspiring
artists and zoologists—as Hardy—were motivated by
that book. Early in World War I, the elder Thayer
(according to his biographer) ‘was greatly disturbed
when he heard that some of his theories had fallen
into the hands of the Germans and were being used
against the Allies, but he also knew that the French as
well as the English had his book and were using it’
(White 1951, p. 134). More than 30 years later, in a
letter to the daughter of Louis A. Fuertes (an American
bird illustrator and Thayer’s former student), British
naturalist and artist Peter Scott, who had designed
ship camouflage during World War II, nostalgically
remembered that
As a boy of twelve, I spent a good deal of time studying
Thayer’s great illustrated book on camouflage and was
much influenced by it. Later on, I became a keen
duck hunter and used a duck punt that was camouflaged in accordance with Thayer’s principles of
negative shading,
( White 1951, p. 137).
equally drawn to science and art, and if the truth be
known, I must confess that it is the latter that has the
greater appeal. I am lucky in not having been torn
between the two; I have managed to combine them
(Hardy’s letter of 1976, p. 1).
He also conveyed the elation he felt as a young
artist–scientist when (a few years before World War I )
he read an influential book by American artist Abbott
Handerson Thayer (produced in collaboration with his
son Gerald, the book’s author of record), titled
Concealing Colouration in the Animal Kingdom ( Thayer
1909). ‘Perhaps more than anyone else’, Hardy wrote,
it was the Thayers who ‘drew the attention of
naturalists to the importance of artistic principles in
the understanding of animal and military camouflage.’ But he added this qualification,
or what is now widely referred to as countershading—
or ‘Thayer’s law’.
2. HIS DISCOVERY OF COUNTERSHADING
It is not known precisely when Abbott Thayer first
realized the survival function of countershading, but we
can be reasonably certain about when he began to
promote the idea. Initially, he did so through informal
show-and-tell—using hand-carved wooden duck
decoys—and then, in April 1896, by formally writing
a paper on ‘The Law Which Underlies Protective
Colouration’ (in The Auk, the American Journal of
Ornithology), an effect that its author described with:
‘Animals are painted by nature, darkest on those parts
that tend to be the most lighted by the sky’s light, and
vice versa’ (Thayer 1896a, p. 125), with the result that
the animal’s body looks flat and insubstantial (figure 1).
Decades later, the journal’s editor, Frank M. Chapman,
recalled the day on which he witnessed Thayer’s ‘first
demonstration’ of countershading:
In parts of the book they let their imagination carry
them away into some absurdities as when they think the
colours of flamingos help to make them inconspicuous
against a sunset!. But it is a great book
(Hardy’s letter of 1976, p. 1; see also Gould 1991).
*behrens@uni.edu
One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue ‘Animal camouflage:
current issues and new perspectives’.
497
This journal is q 2008 The Royal Society
498
(a)
R. R. Behrens
Revisiting Abbott Thayer
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 1. Four stages in a demonstration of countershading,
from left to right: (a) a flat expanse of paper; (b) the artistic
tradition of shading (or top–down lighting), by which a flat
surface takes on the appearance of volume; (c) countershading, by which the undersides of animals are lighter than
the surfaces that have greater exposure to sunlight; and
(d ) the flat expanse of tone that comes from shading being
cancelled out by countershading. Author’s diagram.
One rainy day in the spring of 1896, wearing an old suit
and rubber boots, Thayer came into my office [at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York,
where Chapman was associate curator] and said,
‘Come out in the square, I’ve something to show
you’. Approaching through the mud, the contractor’s
house of a new museum wing then under construction
he pointed to the ground near its base and said, ‘How
many decoys do you see?’ We were then approximately
20 feet from the house. ‘Two’, I replied, and described
them as brownish, approximately six inches long and
elliptical in shape. We advanced a few feet. ‘How many
do you see now?’ he asked. ‘No more’, I said, and it was
not until we had reached them that I discovered there
were in fact four decoys. All were of the same size, all
were coloured Earth brown, exactly alike on the upper
half, but the two nearly invisible ones were painted pure
white on the lower half, whereas the conspicuous
decoys were of the same colour throughout. Thus the
comparative invisibility that constitutes protective
coloration was produced not alone by colouring the
decoys to resemble their surrounding (by background
matching) but also by painting out the shadow that
made their lower half much darker than their
surroundings (Chapman 1933, p. 78).
Chapman was greatly persuaded by this—‘One had
only to see it’, he continued, ‘to become convinced of
its truth and application to the colouration of
animals’—so much so that he published Thayer’s first
paper on countershading (with photographs and a
drawing) in the very next issue of the journal, followed
by Thayer’s ‘Further Remarks’ in the October issue
(Thayer 1896b). Thayer was also invited to speak at the
annual gathering of the American Ornithologists’
Union, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 9–12. According to the minutes, Thayer demonstrated countershading to that group just as he had for
Chapman, but this time using sweet potatoes instead of
wooden duck decoys. The meeting’s attendees were
highly receptive: ‘The experiments were an overwhelming success’, the minutes reported, and ‘The
effect was almost magical’ (Boynton 1952, p. 544).
3. ART, SCIENCE AND SLEIGHT OF HAND
It may not be undue to say that Thayer’s demonstrations really were ‘almost magical’, in the sense that
to observe them was probably equivalent to witnessing
sleight of hand magic at close range: standing by in
disbelief as tangible, physical things vanish into thin air
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2009)
Figure 2. A photographic record of one of Abbott Thayer’s
demonstrations of countershading, using two wooden duck
decoys. The one on the left (which is visible) is the same
colour as the surrounding Earth, but has not been
countershaded, while the one on the right (which is all
but invisible) has been carefully countershaded. Photograph
from Thayer (1908).
(or, in Thayer’s case, do not appear, although present)
in the span of ones unhampered vision.
This pertains to Thayer and countershading
because, for many years, while I myself had read of
countershading (fairly extensively), I had only seen
printed examples in books (drawings, paintings or
photographs, often retouched or adjusted) or in films
on nature. It was easy enough to grasp the principle of
countershading, but my own most persuasive experience occurred in the early 1990s, shortly after buying a
farm. One late summer day, as my wife and I were
looking at the partly eaten leaves on plum and cherry
bushes on our property, we suddenly realized that there
were dozens of hawk or sphinx moth larvae suspended
on the bushes, within easy reach. Not only had we not
noted them initially, they continued to be all but
invisible as, repeatedly, we searched the plants to find
them. At last, we resorted to locating them not by
looking for the larvae but for their droppings on the
leaves, and then looking up from there. Throughout all
this (which went on for some time), we were both fully
aware of and delighting in the fact that we were in the
presence of a ‘demonstration’ of countershading, more
masterful even than Thayer’s.
We have not witnessed this again (although we have
hoped they might return), as it was an atypical season.
The nearest convincing reminder I have is a photograph from one of Thayer’s countershading demonstrations, using duck decoys on wires (figure 2). It was
first published in a paper by Gerald Thayer ( Thayer
1908) in the year before their book came out. It is an
astonishing photograph, with a caption which states
that the picture contains two bird-shaped models (each
mounted on a wire approximately 6 inches off the
ground) of the same size and shape, but painted
differently. The duck decoy on the left (which is clearly
visible in the photograph) has been coloured uniformly
while that on the right has been artfully ‘obliteratively
shaded’ or countershaded. The photograph is astonishing because the duck on the right is entirely invisible,
with the possible exception of an upright portion of
the wire. In reading the caption while looking at the
Revisiting Abbott Thayer R. R. Behrens
photograph, one cannot help but wonder if the text and
the photograph have been inadvertently mismatched—
maybe this is the wrong photograph!
When this first appeared in print in Century
Magazine, some readers may have voiced their doubts.
As a result, in the following year, when the Thayers’
book came out, it contained not only that same
photograph but also this clarification:
The reader will have to take it on faith that this is a
genuine photograph, and that there is a right-hand
model of the same size as the other, unless he can detect
its position by its faint visibility.
( Thayer 1909, p. 24).
And then, as if to provoke any sceptics, the Thayers
introduced a new, second photograph, all but identical
to the first, in which the model is even less detectable
because (in their words) it ‘is still better ‘obliterated’’.
In 1898, 2 years after Thayer spoke to the American
Ornithologists’ Union, he travelled to Europe (on a
ship that was transporting cattle), where he appeared
before various gatherings of naturalists at the South
Kensington Museum in London, at the Natural
History Museums at Oxford and Cambridge, and in
Bergen, Norway and Florence, Italy, installing in each
of those places ‘permanent apparatus demonstrating
the invisibility of a countershaded object’ ( White 1951,
p. 254). Among those in the audience at his European
talks were the British entomologist Edward P. Poulton,
who was greatly pleased by the presentation, and the
biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who, while apparently
less enthused, included Thayer and his ‘discovery’ of
countershading in the 1901 edition of his book
Darwinism (Kingsland 1978).
4. ARTISTS VERSUS ZOOLOGISTS
I have emphasized the word discovery because, as is
frequently noted, it was not Thayer who first discovered
countershading. As has been determined, as early as
1886, Poulton had published his own observations
about countershading, although he did not call it that.
When Thayer learned of this (he had not been aware
of these findings), he graciously conceded that
Poulton had originated the idea, whereupon Poulton
responded—even more graciously—that his had
been only a ‘partial discovery’, and that the bulk of
the credit belonged to Thayer ( Poulton 1902).
Subsequently, not only did Poulton speak openly in
support of Thayer’s promotion of countershading
(‘No discovery in the wide field of animal coloration
has been received with greater interest’, he said;
Poulton 1902, p. 596), he also wrote the narrative for
an explanatory panel that was displayed beside the
models that Thayer installed at museums.
As said, there is a second, subtler sense in which
Thayer did not discover countershading: he did not
discover it in the early 1890s because he already knew it
and had known it nearly all his life. He knew it owing to
his training as an artist. He was a master at shading
or top–down lighting (by which flat surfaces take on
the appearance of volume), and countershading is
simply upside-down or inverse shading (or ‘negative
shading’, as Peter Scott put it). Thayer himself said as
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2009)
499
much—albeit far too often and in a tone that is widely
agreed to have been intemperate, even vitriolic. He
stated it most emphatically (and, no doubt, most
offensively too) in his introduction to Concealing
Colouration, in which he disdainfully said of zoologists
that they are incapable of grasping how animal
coloration functions, because, in his words, it
can be interpreted only by painters. For it deals wholly
in optical illusion, and this is the very gist of a painter’s
life. He is born with a sense of it; and, from his cradle to
his grave, his eyes, wherever they turn, are unceasingly
at work on it, —and his pictures live by it. What wonder
then, if it was for him alone to discover that the very art
he practices is at full—beyond the most delicate
precision of human powers—on almost all animals?
( Thayer 1909, p. 3).
So, it was not so much countershading that Thayer
discovered, but more importantly, he realized the farreaching manner in which it and other artistic practices
had evolved to contribute so critically to the survival
of animals.
5. HIS EFFORTS BEYOND COUNTERSHADING
Having published his findings on countershading,
Thayer might then have discretely backed off from
his trespass on zoology. But he was anything but
ingratiating—the term ‘quixotic’ comes to mind—so
instead of retreating, he chose to push on. He did
so initially by inventing uses of countershading that
might at least be practical, even profitable. Thus, when
the Spanish–American War broke out in 1898, he
quickly teamed up with his neighbour, American
painter George de Forest Brush, in devising a way of
countershading naval vessels (Bowditch 1970). But
that war ended quickly, and while Thayer and Brush’s
son (the sculptor Gerome Brush) continued to
negotiate with the US Navy for a decade, the only
immediate consequence was US Patent No. 715 013,
filed on 2 December 1902, titled ‘Process of Treating
the Outsides of Ships, etc. for Making Them Less
Visible’ (Behrens 2002).
Thayer’s second strategy for going beyond countershading was to look at other artistic practices, ‘the ABC
of painter craft’, in his words ( Thayer 1918), that might
also have survival value. What else did visual artists
know (as ‘sight-specialists’) that might have direct
parallels in the coloration of animals? I think it was this
larger notion (which most likely neither came about
logically, nor as a crystalline insight) that prompted his
identification of two other important components in
animal coloration: ruptive (or disruptive) coloration and
background picturing. In fact, he was already thinking of
these as corollaries to countershading when he
published his first paper in 1896.
In that paper, he describes disruptive coloration
(although he does not use that term) as ‘the employment of strong arbitrary patterns of colour that tend to
conceal the wearer by destroying his apparent continuity of surface’ (Thayer 1896a, p. 127). Beyond that
he says very little, except that it works in concurrence
with countershading. But 22 years later, in a paper
contending that khaki field service uniforms provide
500
R. R. Behrens
Revisiting Abbott Thayer
Figure 3. In part through Thayer’s influence, disruptive coloration was widely used for military camouflage during World War I,
especially for merchant ships (it was called ‘dazzle painting’) because it made it harder for German submarine (U-boat) gunners
to accurately aim their torpedoes. Shown here is an American dazzle-painted ship, c. 1918. Author’s collection.
Figure 4. A watercolour painting by Gerald Thayer of a
ruffled grouse, by which he hoped to demonstrate ‘background picturing’, the resemblance between the animal’s
surface patterns and its customary forest setting. First
reproduced in black and white in Thayer (1908), it also
appears in colour in Thayer (1909).
insufficient camouflage, he implies that he was well
aware of objects ‘cut to pieces’ long before 1896, simply
owing to his training in art. He writes: ‘As all painters
know, two or more patterns on one thing tend to pass
for so many separate things. All art schools will tell you
that it takes a far-advanced pupil to be able to represent
the patterns on any decorated object so true in degree of
light and darkness as not to ‘cut to pieces the object
itself, and destroy its reality’, ( Thayer 1918, p. 492).
In art, at least in Thayer’s time, it was fundamental
to uphold the continuity of the object that one was
portraying—while in protective coloration and military
camouflage, the desired effect is discontinuity or
disruption (figure 3).
It is equally fundamental in art to strive for a formal
coherence among all the various aspects of a composition. A painting, Gully Jimson says in Joyce Cary’s
The Horse’s Mouth, is ‘hundreds of little differences all
fitting in together’ (Cary 1965, p. 145), and in this, his
first paper, Thayer contends for the first time that this is
exactly what happens in protective coloration. The
markings on an animal are functionally comparable to
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2009)
Figure 5. A photograph of the Thayers’ demonstration of
how to use a cut-out silhouette to arrive at an appropriate
camouflage pattern for any figure. First reproduced in
Thayer (1918).
painted shapes on a canvas, while the creature’s
epitomized setting is the remainder of the painting
(figure 4). In Thayer’s words, the patterns on the
animal are ‘a picture of such background as one might
see, if the animal were transparent’ ( Thayer 1896a,
p. 128; an unfortunate choice of terms, because he does
not mean a literal ‘picture’, but, as his son later
clarified, ‘a pattern that pictures, or imitates, the pattern
of the object’s background’ ( Thayer 1923, p. 159)).
He called this phenomenon ‘background picturing’,
and, by World War I, he had arrived at yet another way
to make practical use of his theories. Anyone could
create appropriate, functional camouflage by employing the following method:
[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
( Thayer 1918, p. 494; figure 5).
It is interesting that this method was later adopted,
during World War II, by British-born Australian
zoologist and camoufleur William Dakin (Elias 2008).
Revisiting Abbott Thayer R. R. Behrens
6. AN IRONIC CONCLUSION
Thayer outlived World War I, and died in 1921.
Impaired by bipolar disorder, or in his words, ‘the
Abbott pendulum’, that swung between the two
extremes of ‘allwellity’ and ‘sick disgust’ (Meryman
1999), at the end he had grown suicidal. It was not
reward enough to know that countershading was
generally accepted, or that he had contributed to
military camouflage, in part because some of his
students had served as camoufleurs in France (Behrens
2002). What he lacked was the stated approval of
zoologists and naturalists of such aspects of his theories
as disruptive coloration, background picturing and his
dismissal of the functions of nuptial and warning
coloration—not to mention such absurd contrivances
as a flamingo that matches the sunset.
At the close of the nineteenth century, Abbott
Thayer had been a leading American artist, whose
paintings were widely known and greatly admired, as is
shown by the major collections, public and private, in
which his work can be readily found. During his
lifetime, he would have needed ‘no introduction’
among serious artists and collectors, yet now, he is all
but excluded from books on art and art history, and is
largely unknown among artists, art students and the
American public. It is an odd turn of events that his
achievements are far more familiar today among
zoologists, who are riding a surge of new interest in
empirical studies of disruptive coloration, countershading and other aspects of camouflage that Thayer is
frequently credited with (Merilaita 1998; Cuthill et al.
2005; Stevens et al. 2007).
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