[1] This seems a strange expression; but at that time, when anyone showed a restless activity, they would say that someone had given them quicksilver.
Later the craft of the silhouettist fell into disrepute when it had become part of the curriculum of young ladies’ schools; unskilful artists itinerated, pursuing their craft in booths and at fairs—one in the Thames Tunnel, several on the Chain Pier at Brighton. At street corners magic figures, with concealed workers, were used to entice the unwilling with mystery. Even Sam Weller, in his inimitable letter to Mary, laughs at the methods of the “profeel macheen.”
“So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear—as the gen’l’m’n in difficulties did ven he valked out of a Sunday—to tell you that the first and only time I see you your likeness was took on my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheen (wich p’raps you may have heerd on, Mary, my dear), altho’ it does finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on complete, with a hook on the end to hang it up by, and all in two minutes and a quarter.”
Such is the story, in brief, of the silhouette. Sometimes we see in it a little social document, elevated by fortuitous circumstances or scarcity of other pictorial record to historical value. As in the case of Robert Burns’s portrait, by J. Miers, and that of his brother, Gilbert Burns, by Howie, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, at all times it is passively charming. Surely we need not scorn this step-sister of photography—this poor relation of the art world. In the words of Seraphim, when, in 1771, he flung wide the doors of his Shadow Theatre at Versailles—
“Venez garçons, venez fillettes,
Voir Momus à la silhouette;
Ou, chez Seraphim venez voir
La belle Lumeur en habit noir,
Tandes que ma salle est bien sombre