The Canadian Navy started WW II as a small commonwealth force supporting the Royal Navy and ended the war , due to the demise of the German, Italian, Japanese, and French fleets, as the third largest in the world. Canada appointed her own war artists to document their country’s contributions to the war. This included eight naval officers. One of those officers, LT Rowley Murphy RCNVR, was actually involved in designing camouflage for Canadian naval vessels.
Here he is at work as an artist in 1943.
Rowley Walter Murphy was already an artist and an instructor at the Ontario Art College when the war began. He was given a commission in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve and went to work designing camouflage for some of the 50 American destroyers that were traded to the British in return for basing rights. Some of those ships remained in Canada as part of the growing Canadian Navy. Murphy made a design for HMCS Annapolis based on a reversed Peter Scott/Western Approaches using light blue, white, and pale green colors with an added patch of black.
He also made a design for another of the former American flush-deckers, HMCS Hamilton. That design, with port and starboard sides not at all alike, reminded some people of a cubist stye painting.
Murphy also is credited with a design for HMCS Assiniboine, a former British destroyer. That design was later replaced, but here is a picture of the ship carrying it followed by my own color design drawing of the pattern.
LT Murphy was transferred to the West Coast, where he made this painting titled “seamen on jetty being instructed in bends and hitches”. That painting was featured in an article in Legion magazine in 2003.
He also painted a canadian minesweeper, HMCS Miramichi, that was involved in keeping the channels swept clean of potential mines. Her camouflage, as seen in both the painting and photograph below, is in a distinct style. I believe LT Murphy might even have designed it.
Two other Canadian war artists have been mentioned as having some connection with camouflage, but I was unable to locate any information connecting them with the subject. The two officers are:
LT Anthony (Tony) Cameron Law and LCDR Donald Cameron Mackay (not related to the American camouflage painter Andrew Mackay).
This is Tony aw alongside his wartime painting of a convoy
For the sake of completeness, the other Canadian naval war artists were:
CDR Harold Beament, LT Michael Forster, LT Tom Wood, LT Leonard M Brooks, and LT Jack Nichols. All of them became well known figures in the art world in Canada after the war.
Wetherhorn 