Despite the opinion of Edouart, with which most connoisseurs of the present day heartily agree, much silhouette work was finished in colour. We have before us a delicately painted lady of the Early Victorian period. She wears a grey dress with graceful pleated sleeves, a deep embroidered muslin collar, and the most bewitching cap tied with blue ribbons. Her face and hands only are shadow black. The delightful ringlets of the period are marked in gold, and she is writing in a note-book with a gold pencil, quite a blue-stocking occupation for a lady of that period. In the collection of Dr. A. Figdor, Vienna, there is an elaborate picture of a mother with a young child on her knee; two elder children and her husband complete the group. Only the heads in this group are black. Again, Professor Paul Naumann, of Dresden, owns the silhouette of a Moor. The clothing is brightly coloured, the head alone black. Every collector will find he has some examples where colour has been used to relieve the black of the card, ivory, or glass painting.
It must be remembered that this was the time of glass pictures of the ordinary coloured type, and this glass painting—Églomisé, as the process is called by the learned Dr. Leisching—would naturally influence the minds of the profile portrait painter on glass. So it came about that the two allied crafts gradually overlapped in ideas, and method and points of colour began to appear in uniform or other parts of the picture where colour would obviously add interest of a historical or sentimental character to the silhouette portrait, and in the glass picture of saint or Bible history. The glaring colours hitherto used to appeal to the popular taste began to be modified, and examples are found where the figures are all in black, the background alone being coloured; so that the glass picture is to all intents and purposes a silhouette on a coloured ground.
Of this type is the picture at the Francesco Carolinum Museum at Linz, where eight musicians in uniform are shown in black in the chapel. There is a good deal of wreath and ribbon decoration, and two small curtained windows are in the background.
An important example of the black glass painting on coloured ground is the picture on a red ground in the Berlin Museum. Other red and black silhouette works are owned by Lady Sackville, who has an extraordinarily interesting collection of the Ansley family, painted by Spornberg in 1793. Each portrait is signed and dated, the address of the artist, No. 5, Lower Church Street, Bath, being given on one. These pictures are painted on convex glass in black; the background, outlines of the face, dress, hair, and elaborate wigs, caps and hats, together with the eyes, and slight shading, being painted in black. Over the whole an orange red paint is then worked in at the back, so that one sees from the front the red bust figure shown in black lines on the black background.
CAPTAIN ROBERT CONIG
Of His Majesty’s 90th Regiment of Infantry
Painted on Card. In the possession of Lady Sackville, Knole