The silhouette was another answer to the demand which gave us the reliefs after the antique which Flaxman and Josiah Wedgwood supplied.
At first these paper portraits must have seemed grotesquely cheap and ineffective to men to whom portraiture had hitherto meant a painting on canvas or panel, a delicate miniature, or an enamel of Limoges; but economy was in the air, the palmy days of reckless expenditure on personal matters by the few were over. Marie Antoinette was soon to wear India muslin instead of costly hand-made lace—very soon she might not even wear her own head; the gorgeously painted equipages of the Martin Brothers would give way to the less costly tumbrils. The days of fustian and the proletariat were coming; paper portraits instead of painting; then the apothecary picture-man, as Ruskin calls the photographer Daguerre.
The silhouette was the pioneer of cheap portraiture, which is now so great a factor in modern life. No wonder that, like all pioneers, the shadow portrait was made the butt of the wits.
Born in France, flourishing greatly in Germany, the silhouette soon reached England, and penetrated to the middle class, through the upper classes and court circles, the first English cut portrait that we can find record of being the cut silhouette of William and Mary in 1699. Then, while such men as Gonard were working in France, some of our best English exponents came to the fore. Miers, first of Leeds, then of London, painted generally in unrelieved black on plaster or ivory; John Field, his partner for thirty-five years, whose studio was thronged at 11, Strand, close to the old Northumberland House, which has now given way to Northumberland Avenue. Mrs. Beetham painted in shadowgraphy with exquisite skill, some of her jewel portraits rivalling the finest miniatures in quality. Charles, of 130, Strand, worked in Indian ink with pen on card, and produced such beautiful work that his trade description, “the first Profilist in England,” may well be excused.
It is interesting to note the very varied nomenclature of this art of black profile portraiture. H. Gibb and many others, besides Charles, call themselves Profilists.
Skiagraphy is used early.
The fashionable Shade is mentioned by half a dozen diarists and social writers of the eighteenth century, and was in more common use early in the nineteenth century. Horace Walpole gives us Découpure. Scissargraphist is used by Haines, of Brighton; in rural districts in Suffolk silhouettes are still called Scissartypes, quite regardless of whether the picture is of cut black paper or done with brush or pencil. Hubard, of Kensington and American fame, calls himself a Papyrologist, and his art that of Papyrolomia. In the Art Journal, 1853, p. 140, we read Papyrography is the title given to the art of cutting pictures in black paper.
Shadowgraphy was frequently used by the artists who took the portrait in shadow with or without the patent chair and wax candle so carefully described by Lavater, while some silhouettists are content to describe themselves as artists.
It was August Edouart, the Frenchman, who, wishing to emphasize the superiority of his methods over the machine-made shadows of his day, first used the words silhouette and silhouettist, or silhouetteur, in England. So great a novelty were these names that Edouart relates in his treatise how visitors constantly came to his salon to obtain the new silhouette portrait, and retired disappointed when they found it was only the familiar black shade which was offered to them.