Digital Officer Ben Cunliffe takes a look at silhouette portraits in the archive collection.
These two silhouette portraits come from the Bagot collection in our archives, and are part of a series of twelve such portraits. This type of image was very popular in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, being an effective way of creating a small, portable portrait without the expense and production time of a professional miniaturist painter.
Skilled silhouette artists, working from booths at fairs or markets (and, for the best known artists, professional studios), would cut out the likeness of the sitter freehand and work purely by eye. This would usually take just a few minutes and the cut out shape – usually in lightweight black cardboard – would then be mounted on a light background for maximum contrast. These would often be framed. The smallest examples would fit into a locket, whilst busts like the two pictured might measure typically between 3 and 5 inches high.
One of the most prolific silhouette artists of the 18th century was August Edouart, who cut thousands of portraits of French and English nobility, not to mention American presidents! In England, one of the best known silhouette artists, John Miers, did not cut portraits at all. Instead, he used a method where he would draw the outline of the silhouette on white paper and then fill it in as a solid black shape. So quick was Miers that he advertised ‘three minute sittings’ at his studio on The Strand in London.
Whilst the best artists could create the silhouette by eye, others resorted to casting a shadow on a wall or screen with a lamp or candle and tracing around it. By using a pantograph it was possible to scale a life sized shadow tracing down to a silhouette sized portrait, usually on a white piece of paper. The shape of the shadow was then filled in with black paint or sometimes cut out to form a ‘hollow’, where the missing shape formed the portrait and would be laid on top of a black piece of cardboard to create the finished silhouette.
This pantograph method was refined by French inventor Gilles-Louis Chrétien, who created an apparatus called the ‘physionotrace’ in the 1780s. This device would allow a tracing of the sitter’s profile to be transmitted to a needle engraving a metal plate, which meant that multiple copies could be printed from the engraving. From the 1840s, the development of photography meant that silhouette portraits declined in popularity.
Incidentally, although the art of drawing silhouette figures dates back many hundreds of years, the word itself is derived from Étienne de Silhouette, an 18th century French finance minister who enforced severe economic demands on the French people, especially the wealthy. His name became associated with the phrase à la Silhouette, meaning ‘on the cheap’, and so the quick, affordable cut-paper likenesses became known as portraits à la Silhouette.
Staffordshire Archives and Heritage 