Herbert Knötel was the mid-twentieth century’s acknowledged master painter of military costume.

His father, the celebrated Richard Knötel (1857-1914), was both a successful military artist and the world’s greatest authority on military dress and equipment, being the first to carry through a scientific study of the entire history of that subject. His working library contained over 9,000 books and endless files of methodically screened and arranged reference material. Trained as his successor, young Herbert Knötel assisted him in the preparation of his famous Grosse Uniformkunde, a series of 1,060 colored plates with accompanying texts, covering the armies of most of the civilized world from the seventeenth century until 1914.

In 1914 Herbert Knötel came to full manhood, serving as a squad leader and being wounded during the Tannenberg campaign. Subsequently commissioned, he fought through World War I as a cavalry officer on the eastern front, learning the true aspect of fighting men of many nations. Ever afterwards he could give his paintings a realistic edge of dust, sweat, mud, sun glare, and danger, and depict horses and horsemen with a skill few other military artists have possessed.

Through the years between the two world wars he carried forward and expanded his father’s work, updating and enlarging his 1896 Handbuch der Uniformkunde, extending the Grosse Uniformkunde series, producing the well-known Deutsche Uniformen cigarette card books, and taking an important part in the management of the Berlin Zeughaus Museum.

His reference library survived British and American bombing raids on Berlin, only to be destroyed by Russian artillery fire during the Battle of Berlin. Cramming his most valuable books into suitcases, he and his wife managed to escape. Afterward, his publishing career shattered, he slowly built up a new career as an artist.

Knötel’s work has certain noticeable characteristics. A watercolorist must have a sure hand and work quickly. His paper must be kept moist; he cannot paint over any portion of his work without blurring its colors. Essential details, such as buttons, must be added later with acrylic paint. Knötel’s method was to make a pencil sketch of the figure he was about to paint (traces of such preliminary outlines show on several of these plates) and then paint over it. He had two distinct styles—one a careful documentary presentation, the other almost impressionistic—and he often used both in one of my monthly “contingents.” With both, however, there practically always is evidence of his mastery: look at his figures—especially their faces—through a magnifying glass.

Though increasing age and failing health gradually restricted his activity, his hand and mind remained steady. Watercolors he painted less than a month before his death are among his finest, and his eagerness for new knowledge never slackened.

Soldiers of every nation, in every age, took shape under his skilled fingers. They were not elegant fashion plates, drawn merely to illustrate some uniform regulation of years gone by. Instead, they were a soldier’s soldiers: infantrymen who knew the dragging weight of heavy packs and empty bellies; fussy, officious administrative officers; cavalrymen with eyes alert for the first flicker of hostile movement; gay, gaudy, galloping aides-de-camp. Herbert Knötel has left his armies—of which this is not the least—behind him.