[BITList] Prepare to be dazzled

[John Feltham]

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Wilkinson,  Norman  (1878-1971), marine and poster artist and creator of dazzle camouflage, was born on 24 November 1878 at 2 Eastbourne Terrace, Cambridge, one of the four children of Thomas Collins Wilkinson (b. 1853), music teacher, who left the family in the boy's childhood, and his wife, Emma Johnson, nee Lole (1851-1942). He was educated at Berkhamsted School, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and St Paul's Cathedral choir school, London, which he left aged sixteen to study painting at the Portsmouth and Southsea School of Art. Keen to travel, and with a love of the sea, he joined a ship bound for Spain in 1897 and in the following year studied at the artists' colony of St Ives, Cornwall, where he 'learned what little I know about painting'  (Wilkinson, Brush, 7). After a brief stay in Paris to study figure painting, he committed himself to marine painting and moved to London, taking rooms near Tottenham Court Road in late 1899. His first drawing to appear in the Illustrated London News-a study of boats guarding the royal yacht in Portsmouth harbour-was published in 1898. This began a fourteen-year association with the paper in the heyday of black and white newspaper illustration; in this period he travelled extensively on assignments, including to North and South America. Wilkinson's first advertising posters, of which he became a leading inter-war exponent, were designs for the Liverpool Steamship Company (1903) and the London and North Western Railway (LNWR, 1905). His preference for 'simplicity and truth'  (ibid., 19) broke with the existing practice of complex and detailed images, and drew criticism and praise. Among his early supporters was William Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilders Harland and Wolff, who commissioned paintings of Plymouth and New York harbours for the RMS Titanic and Olympic respectively.

In 1915 Wilkinson enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and served in the Dardanelles, at Gallipoli, and on submarine patrol from Gibraltar. In 1917 he was assigned to Devonport and given command of a minesweeper in the channel. In April that year he wrote to the Admiralty board of invention and research with a proposal on how to camouflage and protect British merchant ships against the growing threat from German U-boats. Wilkinson's idea was not to attempt to make ships invisible to enemy submarines, which he considered 'virtually impossible', but-by means of 'a carefully thought out pattern and colour scheme'-to 'distort the form of the vessel [so] that the chances of successful aim by attacking Submarines will be greatly decreased' (27 April 1917, in Wilkinson, Brush, 79). In the following month the proposal, which the Admiralty named 'dazzle painting', was tested on a small naval vessel that was observed at sea and from the coastline. As a combination of stripes, zigzags, and curves-in black, white, blue, and green-dazzle painting was shown to distort perspective and to compromise the enemy's understanding of a ship's course, direction, speed, and distance.

By June 1917 Wilkinson had secured four studios at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London. Here he supervised three model makers and five naval officers who designed patterns that he studied by viewing painted model ships through a submarine periscope. Approved designs were finished by eleven 'lady clerks', each with art school training, with the final patterns being sent to ports around Britain for implementation. The early success of the dazzle project owed much to the support of Sir Joseph Maclay, controller of merchant shipping, who championed it in the face of early scepticism and hesitancy within the Admiralty. In October 1917 orders were given for the repainting of all merchant and armed merchant ships, together with a number of Royal Navy cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers. By the end of the war some 5000 vessels, including the RMS Olympic, had been repainted with dazzle markings. Following Wilkinson's visit to Washington, DC, in early 1918, his scheme was adopted by the United States navy and also applied to ships in the French, Italian, and Japanese navies. For his invention Wilkinson received £2000 from the royal commission on awards to inventors, and was appointed OBE in 1918. On 12 January of that year, at Marylebone Presbyterian Church, London, he married Evelyn Harriet Mackenzie (1885/6-1967), daughter of Murdo Mackenzie, missionary, and one of the artists previously employed in Wilkinson's studio at the Royal Academy; the couple, who moved to Marlborough Hill, St John's Wood, London, had a daughter, Diana, and a son, Rodney (1924-2004), who himself became a landscape artist.

In the inter-war years Wilkinson gained a reputation as one of Britain's leading poster artists, with a particularly close association with the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company (LMS). The LMS became one of four organizations formed in 1923 from the amalgamation of 123 existing railway companies-the others being Great Western, Southern, and London and North Eastern (LNER) with which LMS was in competition for routes to the north of England and Scotland. With advertising and visual depiction an important part of this competition, Wilkinson was invited to enhance the image of the LMS. He proposed an exhibition of posters commissioned from sixteen Royal Academicians and associates of the academy to whom he wrote in October 1923, describing 'a unique opportunity of giving a lead to pictorial advertising ... [and] providing a chance of educating public taste' (quoted in Hewitt, 34). Of the original sixteen artists, only two-Augustus John and Frank Brangwyn-were unable to accept, and were replaced by Sir William Orpen and Sir Stanhope Forbes; others who took part included Julius Olssen and Sir Algernon Talmage whom Wilkinson had first met in St Ives. The exhibition ran at the Royal Academy, London, and in New York in 1924, with Wilkinson contributing three posters depicting Galloway, Routes to Ireland, and Grangemouth docks-the latter a skilful combination of landscape painting and detailed depiction of machinery that proved particularly attractive to the railway companies in this period.

Subsequent poster commissions for the LMS included a series on sports and pastimes on the railway's route (1925) and famous public schools along the LMS network, including Mill Hill, Oundle, and Repton (1937). In contrast to the geometrical simplification and flat colouration favoured by modernist contemporaries, Wilkinson's designs were characterized by their use of a single, large image depicted in a sensitive pictorial style. It was an approach he had first used for the LNWR in 1905 and led to his claim to be the originator of the modern pictorial poster. Wilkinson's inter-war poster designs also drew on his experience of dazzle camouflage from which he gained a familiarity with the visualization of large objects, and the ability to render complex topographies in the simple forms required for poster art. An accomplished artist in watercolours and oils, Wilkinson combined his design work with a successful painting career. His canvas of the royal yacht Britannia was bought by George V and exhibited at the Royal Academy (1933) and four years later he was elected president of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours.

In 1938 Wilkinson was approached by the Air Ministry to advise on the camouflaging of aerodromes. Early in the following year he was appointed, with the rank of honorary air commodore, as the RAF's inspector of camouflage within the directorate of works. He served in this capacity until 1942 and also advised on the protection of the royal palaces from bombardment. In June 1944 he observed and sketched the D-day landings from the destroyer HMS Jervis. The resulting nine canvases were among fifty-six paintings recording the activities of the Royal Navy, merchant navy, and Coastal Command that he presented to the War Artists' Advisory Committee. Collected as 'The War at Sea', the paintings were exhibited at the National Gallery, London, from September 1944 and were later shown in Australia and New Zealand. Despite Wilkinson's wish that the complete series be deposited in the National Maritime Museum, twelve of the canvases now form part of the collection at the Imperial War Museum. He was appointed CBE in 1948.

After the war Wilkinson resumed his career as a marine and landscape painter, undertaking a series of works depicting Malta, Venice, and Hudson Bay. Having previously published his colour sketches of the Dardenelles (1915) and a study entitled Ships in Pictures (1945), he produced a guide to watercolour sketching in 1953 and an autobiography in 1969. Following the death of his wife, Evelyn, in 1967, he married a long-time friend, Joyce Jervis, nee Moss-Blundell (b. 1908), on 15 May of the following year, at Kensington and Chelsea register office, London. Wilkinson died on 30 May 1971, of myocardial degeneration, at his summer home, Flat 5, Seaview House, Seaview, Isle of Wight, and was survived by his wife and two children. A memorial service was held on 25 June at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London.

Paul Rennie 

Sources  N. Wilkinson, A brush with life (1969) + N. Wilkinson, 'The dazzle painting of ships', Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 68 (1920), 264-73 + H. Goodden, Camouflage and art (2007) + T. Newark, Camouflage (2007) + B. Cole and R. Durack, Railway posters, 1923-1947: from the collection of the National Railway Museum, York (1992) + M. Conway, The elevation of poster art: an appreciation (1924) + P. Rennie, Modern British posters: art, design and communication (2010) + J. Hewitt, 'Posters of distinction: art, advertising and the London Midland, and Scottish railways', Design Issues, 16 (2000), 16-35 + The Times (1 June 1971) + census returns, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911 + WWW + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.
Likenesses  H. Coster, half-plate nitrate negative, 1920-29, NPG · H. Todd, photograph, 1936, Getty Images, London · H. Coster, half-plate film negatives, 1939, NPG [see illus.] · J. C. A. Redhead, Kodachrome colour photograph, c.1943, Science and Society Picture Library · vintage print, 1970, NPG · R. Wilkinson, portrait, priv. coll. · photographs, IWM · photographs, repro. in Wilkinson, Brush (1969)
Wealth at death  £22,493: Probate, 5 Nov 1971, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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