William Twigg-Smith

William Twigg-Smith (1883–1950) was a New Zealand-born painter, illustrator and musician, who lived most of his life in Hawaii. During World War I, he was one of the first artists to serve in the American Camouflage Corps.

After the war, he worked full-time as an illustrator for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association. He also had solo shows, featuring his landscapes of the region. Several of his works are held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, and are in private collections.

Twigg-Smith was born in Nelson, New Zealand. He left home for the U.S. to study art at age 16 at the Art Institute of Chicago under Harry M. Walcott.

In 1916, Twigg-Smith moved to Hawaii. He worked with Lionel Walden and D. Howard Hitchcock on creating the Pan-Pacific Carnival dioramas, which were exhibited in 1917. In the same year, he held his first art exhibit in Hawaii, in an exhibition sponsored by the Hawaii Society of Artists.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Twigg-Smith enlisted in the U.S. Army. Due to his skills as an artist, he was sent for camouflage training at Camp American University in Washington, D.C.. Afterward, he was assigned to duty in France as part of the American Camouflage Corps.

The others of the first four members of that unit were artists Sherry Edmundson Fry, Everett Herter (the brother of U.S. statesman Christian Herter) and Barry Faulkner. In his autobiography, Faulkner recalls that when Fry, Herter, and he first arrived at their tent, "we found a minstrel [Twigg-Smith], easing his solitude by playing Hawaiian airs on a ukulele. He came from the islands and was pleasant and companionable".

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