LIEUTENANT COMMANDER ARTHUR BEAUMONT (U.S. Naval Reserve)
Long Beach Division and TS Arthur Beaumont Division honor LCDR Arthur Beaumont.
Arthur Beaumont loved painting anything; at first, it was horses and cowboys. His love of the sea turned him toward ships, the U. S. Navy, and his destiny as one of the world’s foremost marine watercolor painters. Beaumon, a naturalized U. S. citizen originally from Norwich, England, was born in 1890 and began drawing at age seven. He started formal study in 1912 at the University of California, School of Art in San Francisco. After college training, he studied at the Mark Hopkins School of Art in Berkeley and the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. In 1925, Beaumont returned to England and studied art in London and Paris.
Five years later. While sitting for his portrait, Rear Admiral William U. Leahy convinced Beaumont to use his talent in the Navy. In 1932, Beaumont was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. The Navy sent him into the intelligence service since there was no established track for a naval artist. Before the start of World War II, Beaumont painted almost every ship in the U.S. fleet. In addition, he produced Paintings for the Navy depicting Japanese fishing boats infiltrating U. S. harbors to gain information.
Beaumont later became the Navy’s first combat artist, painting many scenes of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He was he only artist at the Bikini atomic bomb tests in 1946 and the only artist to record the Northwest Passage endeavor in the 1960s.
Rear Admiral David M. Tyree, Commander of Task Force 43 to the Antarctic, enticed Beaumont to join his operation “Deep Freeze’’ party. Admiral Tyree, struck by the beauty of the Antarctic’s vivid and shifting colors, believed that photographs alone could not do the landscape or the mission justice. He wanted the Beaumont because the artist’s work always brought out colors so well. Consequently, Beaumont became the first U. S. artist on the Antarctic continent, and the first U. S. artist to paint the South Pole. Beaumon became well known for his coverage of the Navy’s Antarctic support operations from 1957 through 1961.
The icebound continent was not an ideal studio. The artist found that he could hardly paint with watercolors in extreme sub-zero temperatures without having the water freeze. Mixing the water with some of the Navy doctor’s medicinal alcohol proved the solution. Technically, his works became more “alcohol colors” than water colors. Beaumon completed the only painting ever painted at the South Pole while the wind blew and the temperature was —70° Fahrenheit. It was not easy to work while wearing mittens or gloves, so Beaumont left his painting hand bare and held a hand warmer in his teeth, sometimes with the brush. The painting of the South Pole with its distinctive radar dome has since been on exhibition in the Arthur Beaumont Naval Art Collection on board the RMS Queen Mary at Long Beach, California. The U.S Navy Sea Cadets have made University students, Military Officers, Enlisted, and scholars since 1962. Feel free to donate to see more of our youth achieve the unimaginable.
~ Courtesy of the United States Naval Institute usni.org