Francis Barrett Faulkner

Barry Faulkner (full name: Francis Barrett Faulkner; July 12, 1881 – October 27, 1966) was an American artist who was primarily known for his murals. During World War I, he and sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry organized artists for training as camouflage specialists (called camoufleurs), an effort that contributed to the founding of the American Camouflage Corps in 1917.

Faulkner was born in Keene, New Hampshire. He was a cousin of the painter and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer (sometimes called the “father of camouflage”), who lived in nearby Dublin (White 1951). He was a student of Thayer, George de Forest Brush and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Discouraged by his family from pursuing a career in art, he agreed to attend one year at Harvard University, where his roommate was Saint-Gaudens’ son, Homer Saint-Gaudens. He then returned to the study of art and, in 1907, won the Rome Prize for travel in Europe and study at the American Academy in Rome.

Faulkner returned to the U.S. in 1910, and thereafter worked as a muralist from his studio in New York (Faulkner 1973). In 1926, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1931. He continued to serve as a trustee and active member of the American Academy and in 1960 received a Rome Medal for outstanding service.

With the outbreak of World War I, he and other New York artists anticipated the U.S. entry in the war. With Sherry Fry (who had also studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens), he organized dozens of artists in a civilian pre-war unit called the New York Camouflage Society. After the U.S. entered the war, the U.S. Army formed its own unit, called the American Camouflage Corps, and appointed Homer Saint-Gaudens as its head (Behrens 2002; 2009, pp. 24–25). According to Faulkner’s autobiography, he and Fry, with four other artists (Laurence Grant, Henry Sutter, Harry Thrasher and “Casey” Jones), were the first enlisted camoufleurs. He spent the remainder of the war in France, attached to what was officially called Company A of the 40th Engineers (Faulkner 1973).

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