Following the end of World War II, the United States Navy proposed changing some of the enlisted man’s uniforms as well as those of WAVES and nurses, and commissioned some designs to be created. They also contracted the artist, Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) and the New York-based commercial photographer, Murray Korman (1902-1961) to create mock-ups of some of uniforms. The designs were apparently never adopted, but as John Nicholas Brown was Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air at the time, and aware that his wife was a scholar of military uniforms, the Navy presented him with the photographs and three paintings.
Wyeth painted three designs in oil on panel showing figures dressed in the proposed uniforms. Korman provided photographs of models wearing the proposed uniforms superimposed on a ship deck.
