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The War Years: 1939-1945
The war years mark Beaumont's most prolific period. He painted ships
and battle scenes as an Artist Correspondent; he raised funds for war relief; he created
posters and led fund-raising for the construction of the USS Los Angeles. He also completed an eight-painting
patriotic series of ships for National Geographic
Magazine. His work for the Navy continued as always. In those pre television
days, Beau's skills were sought by the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express.
They commissioned him as a journalist-illustrator to depict European battle scenes for
papers and to paint black and white portraits of the American Fleet. The battle
illustrations showed American readers what the fighting looked like as conceived by the
artist. Tearing news of Naval battles off the teletype, Beau, with his copy of
"Jane's Fighting Ships" before him, would paint the encounter as he imagined it.
The painting, suitably captioned, then appeared under a headline in the evening paper. One
example is The
Raiders...Deutschland and Emden, which showed the sinking of a British freighter
by Nazi ships.
America's isolationist stance disappointed Beau. During his studies in
England in 1925, he had seen the catastrophic toll the First World War had taken. He had
been devastated to learn that all of his boyhood friends had been killed. Therefore, Beau
took a great interest in helping the war effort. Teaming with the film actor Montagu Love,
he organized the Artists and Sculptors Benefit, an auction of works by fifty prominent
Southern California artists which funded war relief.
National Geographic Magazine
commissioned Beaumont to do a series of eight paintings for the September 1941 issue. The
series, "Ships That Guard Our Ocean Ramparts," was designed to garner public
support for the war effort. After their debut in the periodical, the paintings were widely
reproduced in newspapers and exhibited throughout the country...their significance
heightened, no doubt, by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor just three months later. Many
of the ships Beau had painted during the previous ten years were destroyed or badly
damaged in the attack, including the USS Arizona, the USS Oklahoma, the USS Utah, the USS Pennsylvania,
the USS California and the
USS Maryland.
Beau was on the East Coast that December on another assignment for National Geographic Magazine (sponsored by the War Department) to portray Army maneuvers. Being away from Dot and the children made him very nervous. Two days after Pearl Harbor, he wrote to Dot:
"A war is on. Don't get panicky. Los Angeles is a huge city and if anything does happen, it will be the oil tanks, airfields, and the shipping they will be after. Get your little car into good condition, however, stock it with emergency food and blankets...have it always full of gas and oil....Keep all this to yourself, don't talk about what you are going to do...but for God's sake DO IT, and be prepared." 14
The artist signing lithographs of the cruiser USS Los Angeles, 1943.
By 1943, with America engaged in war in Europe and the Pacific, the
Navy announced plans to build the cruiser USS Los Angeles. To help fundraising efforts, Beau made
lithographs of the ship from Navy Department blueprints. The Los Angeles Evening
Herald and Express proclaimed, "Every purchaser of an extra war bond during the
$40,000,000 July campaign will receive an original lithograph print of the new fighting
ship drawn by America's foremost military artist, Arthur Beaumont!'"15
Beau's image of the ship appeared in countless advertisements, on posters and billboards.
The drive was enormously successful, raising $80,371,372, of which Beau personally raised
$1,500,000. In 1947 he was commissioned to paint a large oil painting of the cruiser for
permanent display at the Los Angeles City Hall. (To everyone's shock, the work was cut out
of its frame and stolen in the early 1970s.)
Billboard showing artist's rendition of the USS Los Angeles for the fundraising drive
At war's end in 1945, Beau received a certificate for his voluntary
work with the California State Guard and numerous commendations for his journalistic and
artistic contributions to the war effort.
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Biography written by Allison Barrett Beaumont
Laguna Beach, California
April 1989