The Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online exhibit of Dazzle Camouflage. The images and plans were donated to them by Maurice L. Freedman, a U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation camofleur. The images are wonderful--all the ones I looked at were scans of full plans sheets. According to the site:
Our collection consists of 455 plans (includes port and starboard sides of a ship) and 20 photos. There are 10 types of merchant ships represented with multiple designs for each of those ships.
So the online images are just a taste of the rich resources held by the library.
The site is a little resource intensive, so might not work well at slower connection speeds. Also, the links are not readily apparent--for example, go ahead and click on "What is Dazzle?" as it's as live a link as the "Dazzle Camouflage Blog" or the individual images, even though it doesn't turn your arrow into a hand (at least under Windows, in Firefox & IE).
(As far as I can tell, the Fleet Library was named after FleetBoston Financial Corp., rather than "fleet" in the maritime sense.)
My thanks to MonkeyFist at the Cascobayboaters blog--it was their post that brought this site to my attention.
6 comments:
Brilliant (in more ways than one!!)
Hee! Good one.
This is excellent, thanks for the link.
You're welcome, Douglas!
The photos on the Dazzle bog are quite superb. I'd love one as a poster actually! Here at NMM we have lots of art by Norman Wilkinson, the man who 'invented' dazzle camouflage:
http://www.nmmimages.com/?service=search&action=do_quick_search&language=en&mode=&q=norman+wilkinson&qw=&page=1&grid_layout=4
and a small number of dazzle ships too:
http://www.nmmimages.com/?service=search&action=do_quick_search&language=&q=dazzle
Fantastic--thanks for the links, Douglas!
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