Abbott Thayer’s sketch for a textile and uniform design based on disruptive
patterning, ca. 1915.
Courtesy Abbott Henderson Thayer & Thayer Family
Papers, Smithsonian Archive of American Art.
On 11 November 1896, an American painter known for his society portraits and demure landscapes made an unusual appearance at the Annual Meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Abbott Thayer arrived at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology on Oxford Street bearing a sack of sweet potatoes, oil paints, paintbrushes, a roll of wire, and two new principles of invisibility in nature that together formed his “Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration.”1 In his afternoon open-air lecture, Thayer argued that every non-human animal is cloaked in an outfit that has evolved to obliterate visual signs of that animal’s presence in its typical habitat at the “crucial moment” of its utmost vulnerability. According to him, all animal coloration was a function of this need to hide in the environment.
Thayer identified two visual phenomena undergirding this invisibility: “obliterative countershading” and “disruptive patterning.” In the first, animal skins achieve an illusion of monochrome flatness via coloration darkest in sunlit parts and lightest in areas generally bathed in shadows: examples include the light bellies of otherwise dark rabbit coats or the silver undersides of sharks. The resulting visual compression of a three-dimensional form produces an illusion of monochrome flatness. The second principle takes this illusion to the next level of protective concealment: mottled patterns corresponding to the animal’s habitat disrupt the contours of its flat silhouette, resulting in an impression of not being there.2 An example is the coloration of bullfrogs. Natural selection, continued Thayer, favors individuals visually expressing one or both of these traits and constructs a world of momentarily evanescent animal objects.
This protective coloration was, claimed Thayer, related to a notion of concealment specific to a particular instant snapped out of a continuum of time. As he would later write, “At these crucial moments in the lives of animals when they are on the verge of catching or being caught, sight is the indispensable sense. It is for these moments that their coloration is best adapted, and when looked at from the viewpoint of the enemy or prey as the case may be, proves to be obliterative.”3
...MOREFor the assembled audience of scientists, bird enthusiasts and interested passersby, Thayer introduced his law as a scientific discovery of great importance, uncovered through the workings of an artistic mind. He then used his props to present a disappearing act with painted and posed sweet potatoes, making ones that had been painted lighter on the undersides—“countershaded”—disappear from view.4 Unpainted monochrome specimens, meanwhile, stood out like sore thumbs against the dirt. “The effect was almost magical,” recounted one audience member.5
This game of hide-and-seek was no joke. By 1896, Thayer was increasingly inserting himself into what was a longstanding debate over the origins, effectiveness, and pervasiveness of protective concealment in the natural world. After the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, animal coloration—both its origins and its role in animal behavior—had become a key locus of debate among natural historians, artists, and the lay public. Prior to this period, naturalists had noted instances of animals’ blending in with their backgrounds. It seemed remarkable that God had “dropped” them into place just so—“nature by design.”6 By contrast, in an evolutionary model, there was a gradual “fitting together” over time. Evolutionary theories, both Darwin’s and that of his colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, presented a range of explanations for animal colors. Darwin emphasized interrelations between the sexes as the cause of the showy coloration found in the male of many species; females chose the more colorful males for mating. Wallace, meanwhile, thought color was better understood as the result of strictly environmental pressures. Studying the colors of many insects, he interpreted bright hues and complex patterns alike as either warning signals to potential predators, modes for assimilation in the environment, or mimicry of other, more dangerous, species.
Thayer’s interest in nature’s visual illusions originated in his hobbies as a birdwatcher, hunter, and amateur photographer, as well as in his classical training as a painter. He kept a journal of bird sightings from the woods surrounding his summer home in Dublin, New Hampshire, and collected dead birds to skin for visual analysis and three-dimensional modeling, becoming “an excellent taxidermist through his inborn sense of form and gesture.”7 In the 1880s, he became a reader of Darwin and Wallace, as well as of later biologists inspired by them to focus on the evolution of color.
Within a culture generally fascinated by deceptive visual fields, bird study became a vital link between the concerns of natural science and those of representational art making. Philosopher-psychologist William James, a friend of Thayer’s and a fellow birder, discussed the experience of bird watching in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, describing the study of illusions, or so-called “false perceptions,” as critical to efforts to understand sensations related to depth, color, and movement perception. In the section on illusions, James brings to his readers’ attention the following anecdote recounted by a colleague:
A sportsman, while shooting woodcock in cover, sees a bird with the size and color of a woodcock … but through the foliage, not having time to see more than that it is a bird of such a size and color, he immediately supplies by inference the other qualities of a woodcock, and is afterwards disgusted to find that he has shot a thrush.8James extended examples drawn from hunting to the world of men at war with enemies within and without: “as with game, so with enemies, ghosts, and the like.”9
In the immediate aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis we would often note that banker pinstripes make lousy protective coloration should the mob demand retribution.
As it turned out the U.S. Department of Justice didn't go after anyone.
So maybe pinstripes were perfect coloration.
As noted in one of our 5-year anniversary pieces "Today in the Financial Crisis, Saturday September 20, 2008: Music to Hunt Bankers By" we had settled on the rondo from Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 2 as our theme music:
