It was here that shadowgraphy came to the fore. Even the most ignorant in art work could trace a shadow when thrown upon white paper on a wall or specially made screen, and if the full life-size were considered too large, the Singe, pantograph, or other contrivance could reduce its size; then only scissors were required, and the silhouette-by-machinery maker felt himself to be as gifted as the black portrait painter, or the freehand scissor-cutter, whose work we describe in another chapter.
Etienne de Silhouette, born in 1709, amused himself with the craze of the day. His craft, belonging essentially to this section of mechanical execution, deserves special mention, not because he invented the black profile portrait, for they were made sixty years before he was born, but because his name was given to it in derision, and has stuck to it ever since. Being finance minister, he was supposed to be a promoter of the fine arts, but such was his economy, or meanness, that artists styled his paper pictures “portraits à la silhouette,” a name synonymous with paltry effort and cheapness. This did not, however, deter people from patronising the silhouette artists, nor of attempting, themselves, to achieve the machine-made variety of the fashionable black portrait.
In the Journal Officiel, published in Paris, August 29th, 1869, we read:—“Le Chateau de Berg sur Marne fut construit en 1759 par Etienne de Silhouette ... une des principales distractions de se seigneur consistait à tracer une ligne autour d’un visage, afin d’en avoir le profil dessiné sur le mur: plusieurs salles de son chateau avaient les murailles couvertes de ses sortes de dessins que l’on appelle des silhouettes du nom de leur auteur de nomination que est toujours resté.”
In the seventeenth century, dillettantism was an obsession with the leisured classes. The tendency of the time towards Greek art, as has been indicated in another chapter, helped to popularise the scissor-work of this type of shadow portraiture, and it became a fashionable craze. Though the cutting out with scissors and penknife sometimes took the form of landscape groups and small whole figures, the profile alone in small, though not miniature size, proved the most fascinating branch of scissor-work, and survived the longest in the favour of amateurs, because the purely mechanical shadow tracing required no skill, and inevitably gave a life-like likeness if traced with reasonable care.
There were several methods of securing steadiness on the part of the sitter and the best result as to arrangement of candle-light essential to the success of the portrait. Lavater, who believed so sincerely in the infallibility of the silhouette as an assistance in his physiognomical studies, gives elaborate directions as to how to obtain the best results. He says in Lecture XVI. (we spare our readers the long observations on silhouettes):—
“It may be of use to point out the best method of taking this species of portraits.
“That which has hitherto been pursued is liable to many inconveniences. The person who wants to have his portrait drawn is too incommodiously seated to preserve a perfectly immovable position; the drawer is obliged to change his place; he is in a constrained attitude, which often conceals from him a part of the shade. The apparatus is neither sufficiently simple nor sufficiently commodious, and, by some means or other, derangement must, to a certain degree, be the consequence.
“This will happen when a chair is employed expressly adapted to this operation, and constructed in such a manner as to give a steady support to the head and to the whole body. The shade ought to be reflected on fine paper, well oiled and very dry, which must be placed behind a glass, perfectly clear and polished, fixed in the back of the chair. Behind this glass the designer is seated; with one hand he lays hold of the frame, and with the other guides the pencil. The glass, which is set in a movable frame, may be raised or lowered at pleasure; both must slope at bottom, and this part of the frame ought firmly to rest on the shoulder of the person whose silhouette is going to be taken.
“Toward the middle of the glass, is fixed a bar of wood or iron furnished with a cushion to serve as a support, and which the drawer directs as he pleases by means of a handle half an inch long.