Arthur Lismer similarly painted a series of dazzle ship canvases. Edward Wadsworth, who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the First World War, painted a series of canvases of dazzle ships after the war, based on his wartime work. Experiments were carried out on aircraft in both World Wars with little success.ĭazzle attracted the notice of artists such as Picasso, who claimed that Cubists like himself had invented it. So many factors were involved that it was impossible to determine which were important, and whether any of the colour schemes were effective.

The result was that a profusion of dazzle schemes was tried, and the evidence for their success was, at best, mixed. Each ship's dazzle pattern was unique to avoid making classes of ships instantly recognisable to the enemy. ĭazzle was adopted by the Admiralty in the UK, and then by the United States Navy. Norman Wilkinson explained in 1919 that he had intended dazzle primarily to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so cause them to take up a poor firing position. Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, though with a rejected prior claim by the zoologist John Graham Kerr, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours interrupting and intersecting each other. SS West Mahomet in dazzle camouflage, 1918ĭazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle (in the U.S.) or dazzle painting, is a family of ship camouflage that was used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. For the OMD album, see Dazzle Ships (album).

Camouflage world of warships